Serendipity has been defined as ‘Looking for a needle in a hay stack and finding the farmer’s daughter’. When you experiment with wire, lots of happy accidents occur.
For instance putting square or triangular wire through a round drawplate will chamfer the edges more crisply than filing them. Drawing down square wire carelessly will sometimes result in octagonal wire for jump rings that are a bit different. Doubling up a round wire and pinching and filing the end, will allow you to draw it through a round hole, to produce twinned D shaped wires. Another trick with thicker D shaped wire is to put it through a half round extension groove, on the rolling mill, which is slightly too small . This produces an attractive ledge which looks good on ring shanks.
Then there are slices. Thin slices of triangular wire, with a groove made along one side will be leaf shaped. More filing of the wire would produce tiny hearts. Slices of square wire can also be used for decoration. Slices of round wire, flat or domed, soldered onto thinner wire or tube, will make tidy rivet heads.
Here is one of those Chinese beads painted from the inside, mounted as a rotating globe, showing wire with novel profiles. The second picture shows one of my belts with mini rivets, using small domed slices, the third is a pendant with slices of square wire for decoration.
Bookmarks