Friday, May 14, 2010

Gift for Ma.

I love my mother-in-law. While she may not have properly taught her eldest son (my hubby) to clean up after himself, she's still fabulous. It doesn't make up for all that she does for us, but I wanted to make her a bracelet as a thank you. At first she requested something blue, but admired these purple beads and my other herringbone bracelets, so voila!



Well, not really. The memory wire that I had experimented with - all my creations can properly be called experiments - kept poking out the ends. I had put loops on the ends, but they weren't big enough. Also, the wire had been exposed to the sea air and had started to rust. So, the bracelet came home with me on our last visit for a repair. I wanted to put silver ball ends on a new piece of memory wire. I bought some new memory wire and I already had some ends on hand. I tried gluing with GS hypo cement. I tried gluing with E6000. I tried gluing with super-glue-like Bead Fix. I have some 2-part epoxy on order, but I'm going to save my gluing experiments for another future bracelet.

I ended up putting large loops on the end of the wire. Man! Is this wire hard to work with! It put up a good fight, but I finally got the loops made. Apparently, you can heat the wire to soften it. More experimentation is definitely necessary. The bracelet didn't look quite right, so I added a dangle with some purple quartz chips.



I don't think I could make any two pieces of jewelry alike. I would always find ways of improving/modifying the second one. I wonder how many I'd have to make before I got the perfect version?...

No comments:

Post a Comment