October 10, 2009

Jazz Trio - Rings & Things Product Review


I'm a little behind on my Rings & Things product reviews. The good folks at R & T send their blog partners things to review or experiment with each month. Products provided by Rings & Things include the 8mm Swarovski crystal cubes in topaz and montana blue, the 22 gauge copper wire, the round copper blanks and one lonesome brown lava bead left over from a previous review

I also wanted to work on a piece that used the color scheme of the Art Bead Scene challenge. If you've seen this month's painting, it's a crazy folk art piece featuring a piano playing cow. So to say I stretched the connection between the inspiration and my piece may be an understatement. I loosely used the color scheme of blue, orange and green. .

So here is what I did:
I took the copper blanks and textured them with a screwdriver for the dot pattern and the other blank I used my ball peen hammer. I used my handy metal hole punch and added two holes to make those disks into connectors and then I pulled out my wooden dapping block and domed them into a concave shape. I used an eye pin to hold the beads in the center of those connectors. Next I wire-wrapped the cubes and black wooden beads to the copper chain. The rest of the components are connected with copper eyepins and jumprings. So there we have a nice little necklace that reminds me of improvisational jazz with elements speaking and playing off one another.

Tools provided by Rings & Things: wooden dapping block, ball peen hammer and metal hole-punch.

And really with those 3 tools and a bench block you can make so many different things with wire and metal, I would consider them as essential as your set of pliers.

8 comments:

ClickNCamera said...

Beautiful! The copper blank is now a real eye catcher!

TesoriTrovati said...

That is so gorgeous...and I daresay...worth the wait!
You amaze and inspire me every day.
Enjoy the day!
Erin

Unknown said...

what a great necklace! Love it!

Unknown said...

LOVE what you did with the copper blanks, especially having the little blue nuggets running across the top of one. And then wire wrapping the crystals and wooden beads in the chain. EXCELLENT finished piece!

Alice said...

What a great piece! I love how you made the copper blanks into bezels of sorts! Thanks for sharing.

Dave Robertson said...

- Such embedding! All kinds of riffs on this idea make your necklace jazzy indeed. Thanks for multiple inspirations in a single piece, Heather, how do you do it?!

:) Dave

Unknown said...

Pretty.

Unknown said...

This is gorgeous! I love how you tied everything together, this piece flows even though everything is so different!