Tourmaline Hoop Earrings | Jewelry 101

Hey, hey, Jill School. Welcome in. This is what we're doing today. Little preview, get you hooked in. We're doing a really fun pair of earrings, some more stationary earrings. Again, this is what we're making today. These fun pair of Tourmaline stationary hoop earrings. We've got the little irregular cube beads. Second thing we are using is the round beads. That comes in a set. Tool-wise, we got a lot of tools here. I've got my hammers. I got my chasing hammer and my rawhide mallet. I've got a bench block. I'm also using my wrap and tap and my six-step bail shaping plier. You can use, if you've got, if you want to use a mandrel, you can use a mandrel. If you've got those wooden dowels, you can use those, but you will need your six-step bail shaping plier as well. Okay, first thing we are going to do is we're going to make our frame that we're going to wire wrap onto. And I'm going to use my 20 gauge wire with my wrap and tap tool. So we're just going to cut ourselves a couple inches of our 20 gauge wire here. And y'all, this, I mean, this pair wire, I can't say enough good things about this gold tone brass pair. I mean, I have probably used more of it. I mean, I'm probably the highest consumer of this wire, including customers, because I love it so much. I have so much of it and I'm just hoarding it because I'm afraid we're going to run out of it. I'm not going to have it, but we have plenty of it. And I've got it in the show, but it is just the perfect, to me, the perfect gold wire. And we've got all the cool gauges in it. This is too much wire. You're not going to need this much, but maybe like five inches, four or five inches. So we're going to wrap this on our wrap and tap. I'm going to use the largest step on here. And I'm just going to leave myself like a little bit, maybe like an inch on this end. And then I'm going to wrap with this end around my wrap and tap. And I'm just going to go one time around my wrap and tap and just make sure you're doing a full rotation around your wrap and tap. That way you get a nice circular shape. Look how perfect that circle is. Now we're going to grab our chain nose pliers here and where they crisscross up here at the top, I'm going to pull my long tail straight up like that. And then we're going to come around our, that long tail with our shorter tail. So just kind of hold your circle in shape. This is an earring that you want to make the pair together. That way you're making sure that your circles are the same size. So we're going to come around, kind of fold that around your longer tail and then wrap it around nice and tight. And then give that a little pinch, just to kind of secure that little wrap there. And that's just going to secure that tail and then we'll trim that off. But I want to make sure it's pinching that other piece of wire so that it's not moving. See, I've got it pretty tight there on that piece of wire. So make sure you're getting it pinched down nicely. And then we're going to trim this tail off right here with our plier 61. See how a lot of flush cutters, you can't really, it's hard, you can't get a good cut with the tip. With plier 61, you can. So you can get in your really teeny, tiny little spaces and get a great flush cut. And these are, there we go. Look at that. There's almost nothing to go back in and tuck because it cuts so close. So we've got our little balloon here. Looks like a little balloon. And then we are going to hammer this guy out. So I'm going to start with my rawhide mallet and I'm just going to, I'm just using this to kind of flatten it out and we're going to do some work hardening. We've, we've, we talked about work hardening a little bit last week. When you want to, when you need to stiffen up your metal, you need to work with it and working with it, hardens it, stiffens it up. It compresses the metal molecules down so that like the metal is more dense, I guess. And then are more compact and it's harder to bend. But when you're, when you're working with your wire, you want it soft. When you're wearing your jewelry, wearing your wire, you want it hard so that it doesn't deform and all your hard work, you undo all your hard work. So one way to do that is hammering. It's a great way to work harden. Your rawhide mallet will work harden. Not as much as your chasing hammer. The best way to work harden is like hammering steel with steel on steel. But that also can change, really change the shape of your wire. I'm also going to hammer this tail too because this is going to be an ear wire and I want this to be work hardened as well. I'm still got some bending to do on it, but I'm, I can't work harden it enough to not be able to do that. So I'm not worried about that. All right, now I'm going to come back in with my chasing hammer and I'm really going to, I really want to work hard in this circle. I don't want to flatten it too much because I, because I want to be able to wire wrap onto it nicely still. And sometimes when you, if you get too like squared off of the surface, your wire wrapping can look kind of weird. I am going to flatten it just a little bit because I don't have a choice with the work hardening, but not too much. But really I'm just trying to kind of secure my shape and get extra, I'm getting up there at the top, flip it over, do a little hammering from the back. Not too much. I'm not hammering real hard, just enough to make sure this really, I can work on it. I can wire wrap on it and it's not going to deform with kind of the pushing and pulling that you do when you're wire wrapping. That feels pretty good. All right, so now let's add our round beads. So we're going to use some 26 gauge wire for that. Just cut ourselves like foot and a half maybe of 26 gauge wire. You don't need a ton. You can fill this whole circle up if you want, or you can just do the little bottom half like I did. It is totally up to you. You can shade it or you can mix them, mix all your colors together. All kinds of things you can do. If you just want to use one color, just use one color. Okay, so I've got my 26 gauge wire and I'm going to start my wire wrap on my circle here. I've got about an inch tail there and we're just going to come around our frame here. Again, this wire kit has 26 gauge wire in it, which is one of my favorite wire gauges because it's not too small, but it's small enough. So I wrapped about three times around here with my 26 gauge wire. I'm going to go in with my chain nose pliers here and just pull some slack out. Make sure that wire wraps real nice and tight. Plier 61, cut that tail off and just kind of press that down a little bit. Now we're ready to start wrapping our rounds from our round and rondelle set. So I had four pinks and six other colors. So let me find my pinks here. One, I kind of like used my favorites already on those other earrings. So I'm just going to, those are cute. Okay, so we'll start with a darker pink. I shaded it just a little bit, or really, I mean, I really just pulled them off the strand and went in that pattern, but you can do whatever you want. So we're going to drop a bead down onto our circle here. Then we're going to come around with our wire. Just make sure we're holding it on the outside edge of the wire. It's going to want to pull around your circle, but just keep it on the outside edge and then make sure you're doing a bare wrap in between each bead. And then we'll drop another. We can go ahead and string all these. I like to do that, get them strung, and then we can just wire up real fast. Okay, so then I went with some greens. Let me turn this so I can see. I went with kind of like a darker green there in the middle. Another dark green. Well, kind of like, it's almost like a seafoamy green color. And now we'll go head towards the more green. Some of them are like almost turquoise, but I've got six of the green. And then just work my way out to the lighter green. But like I said, you can do whatever pattern you want. Now I'm going to make a little curly Q down here at the bottom of my 26-gauge wire so that my beads don't fall off the end. Just a little curly Q there. And this is going to make it so that we can just do this real fast. All right, so I've got them loaded up and ready to go. And we're going to start dropping our tourmalines down and we're going to start wrapping. So I'm going to, I've got my tourmaline drop down, come around and through my loop. Make sure to do a bare wire between each one. Again, we're just going to continue this all the way around until we finish with our beads. And it just goes so much faster when you've got it loaded up because you're not stop, kind of stopping. We talk about that a lot about stopping and starting different parts of the earring. Like it's much easier to do and make your jewelry in an assembly line fashion because your brain is not switching gears all the time. You can kind of get in a groove and my wraps start to look better and better as I go. And I can always tell when I start and stop in a wire wrap series. Like in a series of wire wraps, I don't know why it just looks, I can just tell. It just flows much better when I'm not stopping and starting. So now I'm here at the end. I'm a little off center. So I'm going to try to push these around just a little bit. Here we go. Should be able to push around. Looks like a guy with like little hair. Okay, so I'm at the end here and I'm just going to do a couple little bear wraps here. Just like three at the end, just to kind of secure that wire down. Oh, and it's in my finger. And then we're going to grab our chain nose pliers. And again, we're going to come in and we're just going to roll and pull our slack out. I like to pull until my wire breaks and I know I've gotten a good amount of slack out. Ta-da. All right, now we are going to drop our cube down. So just find a cube that you like. I like these ones that have a little bit of blue and purple in them. And that just seriously just drops right on there on that 20 gauge. I love these beads so much. Okay, so now we've got our bead on there. We're going to hold right at that joint right there and I'm going to bend my wire forward, straight forward like that. We're going to come in with our six step bail shaping plier and I'm going to grab with my largest step here, like right next to that bead there. And then we're going to come around, give it a little swoop. And then I'm just going to rotate this up just a hair. I want enough of a bend there that my bead's not going to move or come up, but not so much that your earring's tilted forward. Straighten that out just a little bit and then we're going to trim our tail there like that. And then I like to go back in and just hammer this just a touch just to flatten it out, this ear wire with my mallet. And as always, make sure you're going in and softening the end of your ear wire with some sandpaper or a file or your reaming tool. Here we go. Cute little pair of, whoops, of tourmaline hoops. They're kind of got a party vibe to them. Hey guys, thanks for joining me today. I hope you enjoyed today's demo. If you need any of the tools and supplies that we used today check out the links in the description below. And while you're down there, I want to know what's your favorite color in the tourmaline spectrum? Let me know in the comments and don't forget to like, subscribe and ring that bell so you don't miss any future videos. Bye y'all.