As Lexi Ericson says in one of her videos on soldering, jewelers are kind of pyromaniacs. I've bought a microtorch recently and now I understand completely what she means. Flame colours, molten metal - it's all so fascinating! Here is the result of my very first soldering experiment.

Bindweed is fine :)

I made a pair of earrings today, thought of a name for them (and a title for this post) and was checking Google about the proper equivalent of the flower name in English. Among the first entries brought by Google was the title "Morning Glories are Fine; Bindweed is Not!" "Why? - I thought, - Mine are absolutely fine!" :) Here they are :)

Actually, considering the colour of the flowers, these could be morning glory, but I can't say I've seen a lot of them. I'm more used to what Google picture search shows as bindweed, so be it :) The source of inspiration is not flowers, however, but the tutorial by Oksana Trukhan, though I had to get along without a torch, which I don't have yet. I used riveting hammer instead to fix the flower beads on the wire. Here are some progress pictures.

And I'm thinking again of getting my ears pierced... :)

By the way, about tutorials...

Hi, my name is T(at)iana and I'm an information collectioner. When I become interested in something I tend to find more information than I really need or will ever be able to use. It was the same with wirework, even aggravated by the fact that I had more time to spend near my notebook than with pliers in my hands. I could hardly sort my bookmarks, when a friend of mine invited me to Pinterest. It was so great to be able to see the pictures to all the links, so I brought all my browser bookmarks there. It was about a year ago and now there are more then 400 links to different free wirework tutorials and several boards on some specific topics. Welcome :)

Do you know that feeling, when you read the instruction, you understood the technique, but you can't choose what gauge of wire and what size of a tool to use? I've been thinking about trying danish love knot for quite a while, but couldn't decide what I what to get in the end. At last I allowed myself to spend some time on experiments and ended up with 22 Ga copper wire and 4.5 mm mandrel. 7 or 8 mm beads fit perfectly :)

Some time ago I was asked to make a copy of these earrings, but with beads of a different colour. I decided to make them with copper wire first to practise for nickel silver wire is rather hard to work with. Here are both versions :)

A closer look

Copper wire darkened with liver of sulfur	Heat coloured copper, brass earwires	Copper wire, slightly tarnished

My butterfly collection

Two butterflies have flown to a customer, four are still without earwires. Can't choose what would match heat coloured copper better...

What are you cooking today? I'm frying butterflies. Or baking?.. :)
Here they are, right from the oven. And a pair of copper earrings without any colour changing effects - for comparison.

I created this blog about a year ago but then I was going but couldn't actually start posting something here. I hoped to write down thoroughly about all the things I had made since I discovered wirework for myself. But I seldom had time at least for making things, let alone writing about them. So I think, I should just start :)

So, to begin with...

My 1st year of jewelcrafting

My first year of wirework, actually, for I made beaded and tatted jewelry before (I just like the Jewelcrafting profession in the World of Warcraft). But these techniques became too slow for me when my baby son took all my time, so I switched to wire. It was such a relief to be able to start and finish something in an hour or two while he was asleep :) Or at least in two days :)