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Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Copper Spiral Earrings

I love spirals.  They are found throughout nature, art, mathematics, space and more.  Its fun to keep your eyes out for spirals as you walk through a city or in nature.
From an apartment door in Seattle.

By Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17114028
Spiral Galaxy
So naturally I fell in love with these copper spiral charms by Kristi Bowman Designs.
The charms look so pretty with these faceted prehenite beads, but their oblong shape looked awkward with the shape of the copper.  So I tried several versions of what you see above.  First I discovered that 6 prehenite beads made the circle too large. I tried using 4 beads on Fireline, but the Fireline wouldn't hold a round shaped.  So I tried 4 beads on thin wire and found they were hard to shape nicely. They made sharp angles with gaps between the beads that left the wire exposed.    When I added some matte crystal seed beads between the prehenite, I was able to bend the wire smoothly, without gaps between the beads.   Sometimes it is surprising how much fiddling around it takes to get things just right.
I'm pleased with these now, and I'll probably try this same approach with some other earring charms and a different gemstone.
If you'd like to add these earrings to your spring and summer wardrobe, you can find them here.
And now I'll leave you with one of my favorite nature spirals: A sunflower.








3 comments:

  1. Linda, what a beautiful complement the Prehnite are to Krist's charms! The soft coloring is all Spring! They're truly lovely. And thank you for sharing how you whipped the stones into shape. ;)

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  2. The Prehnite works perfectly in these earrings, I love the way you strung them in to a little square. Pretty pretty pretty!

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  3. Oh boy, do I know about the fiddling part to get things the way you want them to look. You nailed it perfectly. Very clever. Love how the green of the Prehnite egos the green in Kristi's charms.

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