Saturday 24 September 2011

half Persian 4 in 1 (or just another bracelet?)

i can t help it, i am fascinated by the fact that little jump-rings can be combined in all these different ways to make all these different weaves.

isn t it just amazing?

last year i made 5 chains; 4 bracelets and one necklace, all with another weave.

i knew i was going to get some comments from my classmates: 'are you at it again, Aiko?' 'you can t seem to stop!'

well... no, i can t stop ;-)

this half-Persian weave i first saw in the Art Jewelry magazine september 2011 issue. the article was on how to jump-start the weave and it all looked very easy.

(boy oh boy, was i mistaken!)

anyway, i was intrigued, so i made my jump-rings, i used 1 mm silver wire with a 5 mm ID (inside diameter) and tried to begin the weave...

uh-oh, this is not working!

hellooooh! why isn t this working?

the rings jumped aside, then flipped over, and i just couldn t seem to get the hang of it. no wonder someone tried make a starter tool, but that wasn t working for me either.

but i mentioned all this in my earlier post.

here s what it became, like it?



Tuesday 20 September 2011

post - 'kwakkelzomer'

finally, the summer s over.

well, whatever you wanted to call that... i can t even quite remember whether we actually had any warm and sunny days in august. it was raining more often than not.

i guess we had our summer in april and may when we were almost pining for a few drops of rain.

once again, nature is something mankind will never be able to control, it will always do whatever well it pleases. and so it should.

so, this 'kwakkelzomer' is over.

and a new schoolyear has started.

i decided this year to do a repeat course of jewellery repair. i still have so much to learn and i m not yet ready to go into stone-setting nor engraving (i trust other people to do that for me, hehehe).

recently i found another super chainmail weave; a half-Persian 4-in-1 which looks so fluid and pretty, i just had make one.

the start of the weave, however, proved extremely frustrating. i had looked in magazines, on different tutorial sites on the net, on YouTube, all were confusing!
but then i found this tutorial by Nicole Hill on her blog and i knew that was it... YAY!


so half-way there now... i have a little rose-shaped clasp that i think will work nicely...

and as for my other plans this year, you ll just have to wait and see!