How to Make a Wire-Wrapped Pendant | Jewelry Making

Watch more How to Make Jewelry videos: http://www.howcast.com/videos/480871-How-to-Cast-Jewelry-Jewelry-MakingLearn how to make wire-wrapped pendants from jewelry designer Courtney Gray in this Howcast video.Courtney Gray: Welcome to Creative Side Jewelry Academy of Austin, online at creativeside.org. I'm Courtney Gray. I started my school here, Creative Side Jewelry Academy, four years ago. I'm here in Austin, and I'm going to tell you about jewelry making today.Today I'm going to show you how to make a wire-wrapped pendant. This is a really simple, fun design that you can use for all sorts of things. You could create a nice pendant with this look, you can make earrings. Just depending on what you want to do, and, really, I'm going to show you some basic techniques, take those, and do your own thing with them, okay? Keep experimenting and coming up with new things.So what I have today is I have some garnets, and I have a little piece of brass. You can buy these already formed into the shape that you want. This is the pendant that we're going to create, and we're just going to wrap these beads right around this center armature. So we need to get a piece of wire. And this is a 26-gauge wire—this is a little bit thin. You need to make sure that your wire is going to fit through that drilled hole. 26-gauge will fit through a lot of these pre-drilled beads that you'll find out there. We're going to go ahead and start wrapping around our armature. I'm going to wrap around two times.You're going to need some pliers, flat nose, some needle nose, and some round nose pliers. You're going to need some good snips. We snip that last little piece of wire down, and we're going to go ahead and feed our first garnet bead onto the wire. You don't need to have it quite so long, but better to have more than not enough. I have my bead in there, and I'm wrapping around that armature once, and twice. And now you can do that as many times as you like. Two wraps looks nice for this type of pendant. Pull it tight, and you're going to attach your next bead.We make all sorts of fun, wire-wrapped projects in our wire-wrapping classes that we offer here at Creative Side Jewelry Academy. This is a classic herringbone weave, and you may have seen it out there, and we show you how to make a bead cap for this type of large stone or smaller stone. So we're going to continue wrapping those around, all the way around your armature.Do your own thing, try to be original. Your pendant should look something like this. You can add on a nice little briolette at the bottom if you'd like, and a jump ring at the top to hang your pendant.|