Herringbone Wire Weave Earrings - Wire Wrap Tutorial

Hey everyone, welcome back! It's Abbey from Abbey Road Creations and today I got an order on Etsy for my lapis lazuli raindrop earrings. So these earrings are pretty much this herringbone weave and then I like to add a few little beads to extend them to make them extra long dangles. So while I'm making this order I wanted to video it and let you guys in on how I make them because this weave is a really fun weave to learn and I feel like it looks very impressive like it looks you actually know what you're doing whenever you're wire wrapping. So this is a cool way and easy way to impress your friends. So to get started I am going to be using two 12 inch pieces of 20 gauge or 0.8 millimeter copper wire. All right I have my two 8 millimeter gemstone beads and then if you want to add the beaded extension you'll just need two small pieces of wire. I'm using three inch pieces of 22 gauge which is a 0.6 millimeter. If you don't have this exact gauge you can also use like a what would it be a 26 gauge which is 0.4 millimeter wire that should be strong enough to hold the beads and for my beads I just have two millimeter, three millimeter, and four millimeter copper beads. Again if you don't have the beads or the smaller wire don't let that hold you back from learning this weave because you can just make simple earrings like this instead. For your tools you will need your basic set of wire cutters. I always like to use a flush edge which means it's flat. If you don't have these don't worry about it just use your basic wire cutters and you'll need your basic chain nose pliers and some round nose pliers. All right so once you have your tools meet me back here and we'll get started. For the first step we're just going to take one of those 20 gauge wires and our round nose pliers. All right so you're going to measure about three inches down. I've already marked my wire here so I know where to start and you are going to carefully pinch it with your round nose pliers and we're just going to make a little loop. So what I do is I bend it in one direction then I push the wire over wrap it around and then to finish it I like to take my chain nose pliers because if you pinch too much here with your round nose pliers you're going to leave a dent which will leave a weak spot and may eventually break your wire. So pinching with the chain nose pliers we are going to start wrapping this wire around eight times. Okay now since this is kind of a stiffer wire the way I like to do this is I like to push with my index finger because we want these to be nice and snug. It's about five. As you can see I'm kind of just pinching and twisting my fingers to do this. I think I lost count. I think that's about eight. Let me make sure. Yes that is eight. All right so once you have this we are going to take our wire cutters and just snip that off. Okay grab your chain nose pliers to push that in that way we have a nice even surface to work with. And now we're ready to start with the leaves. So we will grab our beads. I'm using lapis lazuli. It has a pretty royal blue color. Go ahead and slide it on all the way to the end. So we are looking at the front of the design now. I'm simply going to bend using my thumb and I'm bending it to the right. It doesn't matter which side you start on. Whenever I'm making earrings I actually alternate. I just want to remember which one I start on. That way I do the other one in the opposite direction. So I bent it to the right and all I'm doing is I'm curving it up really snug along the bead and it's laying flat on top. Pinching here with my fingers. I'm going to curve this wire all the way around. Keep going until it is until we're back at the front of the design. Okay that's all we have right now. So we are going to shape this wire. Give it a nice curve. I like to use my index finger. Curve it down so that it frames the bead. We are going in front of this wire right here to hide it. Curve it back up. Okay and once again we're going to twist around. I'm pinching with my left thumb to hold this wire in place and I'm kind of guiding it with my other thumb or index finger. Making it sway all the way back around so that it finishes on the left side. Okay do that once again. The wire is on the left side. Curving it down kind of getting a nice curve with my index finger. This time we're going to line it up behind. Curving it around. I still want it to be kind of nice and snug so these all line up really well and then we're going to wrap it around that coiled wire again until we get to the other side. Okay do this one more time. Once again curving it down. We're on the left side here. We are going to line it up right behind that last one that we did and curving it back up around and one last time finishing on the left. As you can see we're at the top of the design now so I am just going to twist it around to the back so that we can hide the wire on the back. We're going to clip it off right here. All right take your chain nose pliers to squish that little edge in and there we go. So if you're not going to do the beaded extension this is where you'll stop. You can just add an earring hook here. To do the other one it's your choice. You can either do it the exact same way that you did this one by starting bending on the right or you can kind of create a bit of an opposite effect and bend on the left. Just the exact same movements you just wrap the wire around. Sometimes it's just a bit funky switching your brain to the other side and remembering which direction you're going so that's up to you. If you want to join me and do the beaded extension let's go ahead and grab that three inch piece of 22 gauge wire and your round nose pliers. So let's start here. We are going to start with the little loop at the top so gently pinching. We don't want to squeeze too hard. Bend to one side and push to the other. Okay and as always I like to take my chain nose pliers so that I can pinch it and wrap that wire around. We're just going to wrap it two times and then carefully snip that off. As always we're going to pinch everything in so there's no sharp edges. Now that we have the little loop we're just going to add our beads going from the smallest to the largest. So I will start with my two millimeter bead, three millimeter and four millimeter bead. Slide it all the way to the end and now this time we're going to make another loop but this one will be a bit different so make sure you pay attention. All right grab your round nose pliers and we're going to pinch very close to this bead so that they are nice and snug. Now as you can see I have my pliers on the front of the design instead of the side. I'll explain this to you in a minute if you don't quite understand what I'm trying to say. I'm going to bend it forward and then just push back that way you have one loop that is facing different ways. I promise I'll explain this better in a minute. All right wrap that around but don't close that loop up yet okay because we need to be able to slide the earring onto it. Okay so with your with your wire facing up you're just going to slide the earring on. In order for the earring to be in the right direction you'll slide it face down. It'll do a little loop-de-loo and come back off the right side so everything is on the clean side with no sharp wires showing. Okay so about the loops that I had a really bad time explaining. So you want this loop up here to be flat because your earring hook will go in this way and you want this hook here to be more like a vertical position so that the earring will line up so that these will all line up well whenever you're wearing them as earrings. Man I am not good with words today. If you guys have any questions about this feel free to leave a comment. So to close this up the loop right here with the beads I'm going to pinch with my chain nose pliers just to give myself some stability and then I'm just going to start wrapping that wire around. Okay that's what it's looking like right now. I know that this little earring here is kind of getting in the way if you guys seeing what I'm doing. As you can see I wrapped it around twice to make everything nice and secure. And now at the back of the design we are just going to clip this wire off and then squeeze it in with our chain nose pliers to make sure everything is nice and secure. Okay so there it is. That is my raindrop earring design. Okay you can take one last final look make sure everything is kind of straight and in line. I'm not going to add the earring hook yet because I do need to oxidize this first and I'll make the other one but it's the exact same thing so I don't want to bore you guys by making another earring in the same video. If you guys have any questions though feel free to leave me a comment and I am working on some pendant tutorials for you guys so hopefully I'll have those on my channel soon. Before I go I just wanted to give you guys a look at the finished earrings after I oxidized and polished them. If you guys are used to pure copper you can do the same thing just make sure to check out the video on oxidation that I have on my channel and you'll learn how to do this technique too. I hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial and I'll see you next time!