JEWELRY TWISTED WIRE |
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Twisted wire - the art of twisting wires! I learned this technique in . . shoot, 2002? 2003? I don't remember. I do know I learned it from Viscountess Katira at an arts and sciences event at Bort Meadows. It was a lot of fun, and I've continued with it ever since. |
| This form of twisted wire was popular in Roman and Byzantine times, the perfect adornment for my Byzantine persona in the SCA. I've made many necklaces and bracelets for myself, my friends, and as donations to royal gift coffers. It even made an appearance during my first tech writing class at De Anza college, where I wrote up a document on making twisted wire for a assignment. Go ahead and use it, if you like; it's not quite a a class handout, but it does the job. Also, it's a PDF document, so you need Acrobat Reader and might need to make an allowance on your computer to open it. |
| What grade did I get for it, you ask? Why a 48/50. :D |
| So let's see what we have here . . it looks like quite a lot of the same stuff. I use 22 or 24 gague ColorCraft wire in either silver or gold, and sometimes copper. The beads I use are round, center-drilled, and either 4, 6, or 8 mm in size, and are either dyed dolomite marble or semi-precious gemstones. They were all purchased from Fire Mountain Gems. |
| The first two pictures on the left are pictures of some of my earlier and later undated projects. The middle two are pictures of projects taken on 6/6/06, which I believe was right before the June Crown where they were auctioned off in Crosston's Silent Auction. |
| The last picture is a scan from page 40 of Daniela Mascetti and Amanda Triossi's book The Necklace: From Antiquity to the Present, and shows two necklaces (top) from the 2nd-3rd centuries, and two necklaces (bottom) from the 6th-7th centuries. The twisting technique stuck around for all that time, only the people who made these used fewer twists than I was taught to use. Perhaps this is due to the need for speed in the search of a profit; perhaps it was just the way it was done. Who knows? |
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