Week 26: Halfway to the Finish Line

In celebration of making it to week 26 out of 52 I decided to treat myself and do another wire wrapping themed week.  No fancy stuff this week, but I did try a few new techniques and I'm pretty pleased with the results.

Wire wrapped tumbled howlite stone with red jasper and snowflake obsidian accents.  I've been meaning to try out some different styles of wrapping undrilled stones, and this was experiment one of several this week.

Another find from The Crystal Connection; I got about a dozen of these amazing double terminated quartz crystal points and just knew I had to figure out how to wire wrap them to make them into jewelry.  The accent beads are rose quartz, citrine, peridot, and iolite.

My favorite of the week, a wire wrapped undrilled rutilated quartz piece with tiger eye accents.  I didn't intend on wrapping it this way, but the stone was so perfectly shaped to have a center wrap that it all just sort of fell into place.  The rutilated quartz piece is from The Crystal Connection.

Another variation on wrapping an undrilled stone.  This time I used of my favorite semi-precious gems, rainbow moonstone.  It is really hard to find good rainbow moonstone tumbled stones that don't have a lot o  

With this project I tried to do a more traditional wire wrapping style with a cabochon I got in the clearance isle at Michaels.  (It's chipped just a little bit on the middle of the left hand side.)  It turns out that while I CAN do this style of wire wrapping, I don't much enjoy it.  I'm not all about things like "measuring", so while the end result is that the cab stayed in the setting, the wrapping on the sides are uneven.  : )  Back to more organic styles for me! 

This necklace is made out of a very cool piece of raw amber my mom picked out.  The point at the base made it easy to "capture" the stone between two wires, and then twist to secure.  Criss-crossing over the body of the amber secured the stone and added some interest to the front without taking away from the amber.  All in all I'm 100% pleased with this piece, which doesn't happen often.

And here's the "bonus" project for this week, a nice tumbled Malachite stone wrapped in the same style as above.  It's pretty amazing what a heavier gauge wire and a different stone will do to make the same wrapping technique look completely different.  : )

And finally, the gem of this week's collection, the crazy wrapped agate druzy pendant.  I don't exactly know what happened here, all I know is that I decided it would be really fun to bead the wires that were left at the top instead of weaving them into the typical bail.  The result is totally different than any wire wrapping I've done before, which is pretty pleasing!  I'm going to have to try to work in beaded wires into more of my wrapped designs.

Now the hard part is going to be deciding which ones to keep and which ones to part with!  (Hint; that Malachite pendant is so totally on my neck right now.)  Thanks for stopping by, and we'll catch you next time!