Adventures in Wire Crochet

With a 10-month-old at home, my beading and wireworking time is at a minimum. The pressure of having a blog post ready has helped keep me a little more focused, but not really. I haven’t made nearly the number of flowers and leaves as I had intended, but I have started to play around with another new wire working technique – wire crochet. 

I always meant to learn to crochet. I had visions of giving fuzzy scarves to all of my loved ones at the holidays, but I haven’t had the opportunity to jump on that bandwagon yet. I dabbled with bead crochet ropes a few years ago, but abandoned that to move on to the next technique (sensing a pattern, here?).

During BeadFest Philly this year, one of the visitors to our booth took a few moments to teach me to wire crochet. It was a wonderful, sharing moment – she was a crocheter who showed me how to do a turn and start the next row (it’s just like a “step up” in peyote stitch), and I helped her understand that wire crochet is organic and things like “uniformity” and “even tension” go out the door when you're working with wire.

So, I’ve been practicing, perfecting and realizing that I need a few more hours in the day to get some beading done. Eventually, this will be long enough to attach my flowers and leaves and we’ll have an actual, finished necklace! See my post on epic projects to place bets on how long this will take.

  

Things I’ve learned:

·      If you’re going to keep a bunch of projects together in a bag that you schlep back and forth from the office, do yourself a favor and put each project in a separate bag.  (Yes, I learned this the hard way, ie. a tangled mess.)

·      Wire bends. It also bends back.

·      The right tools are really important, but sometimes, your fingers are the best tools for the job.

- Meredith Roddy for Beadalon