Wire Sun and Cloud Earrings - Wire Wrap Jewelry Tutorial

Hey everyone! Spring is here and I thought it'd be the perfect time to show you guys how to make these sunny rain cloud earrings. So grab your tools and I'll meet you in my studio. To get started in today's design I'm going to be using two 9 inch pieces of 20 gauge copper wire which is 0.8 millimeter. I'm not exactly sure of the exact length we'll need so I'll make sure to add a little memo in the captions on the video just in case I use too much wire that way you These are two 9 inch pieces and then we'll also be using this is a 14 inch piece of 24 gauge copper wire or 0.5 millimeter. If you find that this wire is too stiff to work with because this is the wire that we'll be using to weave the little rays of the sunshine. You can also use a 26 gauge or 0.4 millimeter wire. We'll just have to adjust the weaving pattern a little bit but I'll let you guys know what to do whenever we get to that point okay. I'm sure the same length will be all right with the 26 gauge wire. In order to do our weaving pattern you'll also need three about two to three inch 20 gauge scrap wires. These we'll just be using to form the weave around to get the shape of the sunshine rays and then we'll remove these so it's all right if these are not perfect. I just keep scrap wires on my desk from old projects so that I can use these whenever I need to. Then I also have a scrap piece of just 26 gauge wire to add the bead. I may use if I have any left over I may use the 24 gauge or 0.5 millimeter but I'm going to make that decision whenever we get there just to see what works best with it. This is my little bead for the raindrop for my rain cloud. I really like the blue color it goes really well with the yellow citrine that I'll be using for the sun but feel free to use whatever color you want to all right this is totally up to you. Then I also have just two copper earring hooks that I'll be adding. If you don't have any earring hooks you can also make your own. I'll show you guys how to do that at the very end of the video. You can use your scrap wires to do that and then for our tools I have my round nose pliers, I have chain nose pliers and I have wire cutters. I really love flush cut wire wire cutters they leave a nice flat edge but if you don't have those don't worry about it just use whatever you have it's all good. For my design I'll also be using a hammer and anvil. If you don't have one don't worry this step is totally optional. If you're using plated wire just make sure to skip this step so that you don't risk damaging your wire okay. All right so once you have all your tools come meet me back here and we'll get started. So I'm going to start with the rain cloud design so just grab any one of those nine inch pieces of 20 gauge wire and just find an approximate middle point okay. So what I like to do is just simply use my hand to work with the wire to make one of those little cloud loops okay. It's all right if it's not perfectly in the center I just gently work with it pushing and then you can pull a little bit too until we get a teeny tiny loop and then this loop will end up being the bottom part of our cloud and then we'll work our way up to the top. So once you get a size that you like let me grab a measuring tape so I can give you guys a better idea. So mine is just over half an inch or if you're in the metric system we're at about seven millimeters here. So at this step if you are using your hammer and anvil go ahead and grab that and we are just going to gently hammer around this little curve right here just to make it a bit more defined. Okay so just lay it flat and gently hammer around here we go. Okay give it a look to see if you like it I think that looks good for me. Just get that out of the way and now we're going to make our little bends for the rain cloud. So I like to grab my chain nose pliers and I'm flipping it around just because it works better for me. I'm just going to grab right here so you want to grab a little bit below the point where you want that little bend to be just because the wire is going to take up some room whenever it bends. Then I'm gently going to just kind of push that back and then give a gentle punch with the pliers nice and gentle so I don't risk scarring the wire. Even if you have super good pliers it doesn't matter if you mishandle them you can always leave little marks on your wire. Okay once that's bent back I just like to use my fingers and continue this little fluffy cloud pattern around. Okay that's what it looks like so far. All right so to give you guys an idea for spacing we're going to have three little puffs on the bottom and then three little puffs on top and we want to just try our best to kind of keep some balance in the design so that these two are lined up and they're not kind of askew. That way whenever we put the earring hooks on the earring will balance and it won't be off to one side. Again I just create the size that I like. I think that looks good and puffy and once again I'm going to go to my hammer anvil. I'm flipping it over that way I'm hammering on the back side and I don't get any of the dents from the hammer on the front of the design. This is just my personal choice if you like the little bumps the indentation looks you can do that too. It would look really cute on the cloud I think. Again just pinch with my pliers here a little bit above where I wanted that bend to be and then gently pinch down with my pliers. All right I like to kind of alternate sides just to kind of make sure I'm keeping everything balanced and now that I have one on the left I'm going to hop on over to the right side and do the same thing. So on this side instead of bending the wire back I'm going to bend it forward just to kind of keep that alternating pattern going in our design. This time I'm pinching and I'm just actually pulling and pushing that wire on the front of the design. Like I said this step is not necessarily important the direction that you go like is totally up to you. This is just how I've always done my design so I like to stick with it that way it's the same as the photo for the customers. Okay now that I have that bend just gently little by little working with my fingers and if you guys are using plated wire for this design a lot of people have asked me recently like what's the secret to getting smooth curves and wire how do you make it look so easy and to be honest like I feel like copper wire just is easier to work with. Plated metals they're treated sometimes the plating is thicker and they're processed in different ways and even within the same roll of wire you can have parts of the wire that are really soft and bend really easily and then suddenly bam the wire is really hard to work with and it creates kind of an inconsistency in your design. So don't get too hard on yourself it still happens to me it's not always you the wire can just be faulty sometimes so just be patient and keep working with it. All right so I'm going to hammer my little pot I really do like making this design there's something about it that's really calming and soothing oh no I think I went the wrong way well we'll just have to go with it you see it doesn't matter how many years you've been doing wire wrapping you're still going to make mistakes sometimes there we go so once we get to the top layer of the pots you may need to kind of work with the shape a bit with your fingers bending it a bit more it's all right we'll do like a final lining up with a little cloud before we finish everything up okay that looks good all right let's do one more on the left side and then we'll have just like that center puff that will complete our little cloud it makes me smile every time I say the word puff because that's actually kind of the nickname for our dog I like to call him puff puff because if you know how dogs get whenever they get all like excited and stop their first sticks off and our dog is really scruffy so he just looks like a big furball whenever he gets all excited and wants to play and I like to call him little puff puff here we go let's hammer this last little puff right here all right looking a bit more like a flower actually that's kind of cute let's work with it to give it more of a little cloud shape all right I'm going to bend this wire back on the left it doesn't really matter which wire you use to finish it with I just have I'm just used to using this wire at the end to wrap up the cloud kind of I love using that edge of my thumb to get smooth nice and smooth curves all right so yeah you can see right now it's a bit wonky like that's not perfectly lined up so just take your time kind of push and pull your cloud because ideally we do want these to kind of be centered up that way we can just put the earring hook on this top little puff right here and the design will hang and flow freely and it'll give a nice smooth look to our cloud so I have a bit of excess wire on this back side right here I'm just going to go ahead and trim that off that's my wire cutters make sure you're cutting the wire that's behind and not this top wire okay I'm just gonna cut it off like that that way the wire is just kind of like can go through the cloud it's kind of free right there what we're gonna do we're just gonna wrap this wire around and then these two will be hooked together so yeah actually let's go ahead and cut this wire too we don't need it for the way that we're gonna do this design so I'm leaving a little bit less than half an inch whatever you're comfortable working with okay finally have my cloud the way that I want it so I'm just going to go ahead and hammer this last little loop up here and now for the finishing steps I'm going to grab my round nose pliers and I'm just going to start to curve that top wire in okay just little by little one of the secrets to successful wire wrapping that I learned the hard way over the years is not to rush things just move the wire little by little because it's easier to move the wire the first time than to move it back into position if you put it in the wrong place okay that is looking good it's not tightened yet I'm going to wait until the end to clip that off and tighten everything up I just want to make sure that I'm getting the right shape that I want because sometimes whenever we're tightening things up we have a tendency to pull the wire too much and it'll completely throw the design out of proportion same thing with this one just gently little by little I'm going to work that wire curving it back all right and then I'm just going to trim these off a bit more we're essentially just going to curl these two back and then punch them in so I just want to make sure that that wire is a little bit shorter you can also at this point start using your chamf nose pliers to kind of pinch everything in right and then I just keep repeating this process of rotating trimming pinching until I get everything kind of secured in the shape that I want it to be okay so remember take your time there's no use in rushing it at the end of the design after you've already done all this hard work that's where a lot of mistakes are made and myself included all right and there we go all right if you haven't quite finished it that's all right pause the video take your time and just meet me at the next step where we'll be adding the little raindrop to the top okay for the raindrop just grab a small piece of either the um 24 gauge the 0.5 millimeter or 26 gauge 0.4 millimeter I think mine's literally like two inches or something just enough to where you have enough for your fingers to work with and we are just going to thread our bead on there I think I have maybe about 0.75 inches hanging off and I just push the wires up the short end crossing over the long end and then I just fold that short end over if you're using a thicker wire like I am with the 24 gauge you may want to give it a little pinch and then fold it over one more time you can use your pliers for this if you're having trouble holding on to that little wire edge and then give it one more pinch to make sure that wire is tight before we go in with our wire cutters and to trim that off as close as we can that way the wire edge is on the back side and now we just want to make sure that that long wire is sticking straight up you can use your hand or your pliers and we are just going to make a tiny loop I just like to bend it forward with my fingers first give it a basic round shape and then grab my wire my round nose pliers and gently make like a little loop so I like to leave like a little gap if you can see it's not too close together because what we're going to do we are going to poke that wire through the cloud and then slide that on okay so we need that loop to still be open whenever we do that and this is the part where it can be kind of tricky attaching things we are going to have to close this wire around but it can be really easy to pull too tight and to close that loop and then make it really wonky or to the point where it won't slide on the cloud anymore so we are going to print with our chain nose pliers but right before we do that I just want to remind you guys don't make this loop here too big because then it'll have the habit of going around the little cloud loops right here so just make sure that it's enough for it to flow freely along the base of the cloud right there all right we're just going to grab that with our chain nose pliers just to have something to hold on to and to keep that wire where it is while we pull there we go so while we pull this wire around I know it's a bit tricky for you guys to see with that cloud hanging below so all you're doing is pulling that around to wrap it the same way that we kind of did at the beginning okay I like to give it a little pinch to get everything lined up before I go in with my wire cutters and trim it off one more little pinch in case there's a sharp edge all right and there we have our ring cloud and now we can move on to our little sunshine okay before our sunshine we can get rid of our hammer and anvil we won't be needing those and what we can do is we can grab that other piece of 20 gauge wire the long one and we will grab the 24 gauge the 0.5 millimeter or the 26 gauge the 0.4 millimeter wire that one that's like 14 inches long and we are going to start the sunshine weave so starting on the left side of your wire about let's say two inches in I'm just going to hold my left hand and placing the thinner wire on top I'm leaving a little tail to have something to hold on to and I'm pinching it with my thumb here I'm going to keep everything in place and I'm going to wrap the wire around guiding it with my fingers making sure that it wraps tightly and cleanly I'm just going to do two times in the beginning so at this point if you are using the 26 gauge wire the 0.4 millimeter because yeah the 24 gauge can be a bit tricky whenever you're first starting out it's thicker and it's harder to manipulate so no problem 26 gauge whenever we wrap around this base wire right here and I'll remember to remind you guys whenever we're doing this you are going to wrap three times instead of two so just add one more round and you'll be good to go okay so at this point we will grab those two little scrap pieces of 28 gauge wire and just balance them on top pinch with your left hand to keep everything in place as we guide the wire on top making sure it's laying flatly and cleanly lined up next to those other two so now we're going to wrap it in between to go back around this base wire okay to do that and I'm just going to show you guys what I do it may be a little tricky if you're still starting out I like to guide it with my left hand but it is kind of an octopus balancing act to do this this would be a more advanced technique but once you get used to weaving you will start to use your left hand in it more you can see I'm using that finger to hold things in place to help guide that wire I wrapped it two times if you're using 24 gauge wire wrap it three times if you're using the 26 and then you're just going to finish with that wire going straight up okay at this point we will grab that third and final little 20 gauge scrap wire and we will add it on top pinch everything with that left hand as we hold that wire down nice and smooth lining it up okay you can pinch everything in and once again we are going to wrap it around the long base wire and only that one okay do this two times if you're using 24 gauge and three times if you're using 26 every now and then you can use either your chain nose pliers or if you have like nylon pliers the ones that have the rubber tips that's also good just be gentle gently pinch everything down to make sure everything is staying nice and flat and smooth and then we can continue with our weave we are just going to be repeating this over and over again until we have enough little rays for our sun pulling it down over the two scrap wires twice around the base wire and then up and over if you are using the 24 gauge wire like i'm using you really want to try and be folding fold the wire that way it doesn't bubble up too much and you're using the 26 gauge it's a bit easier because the wire is thinner and it likes to move a bit more continuing that with two around the base wire i'm going to take a short little break here just to smoosh everything down because i see that these wires are starting to kind of scrunch up a little bit i don't want that to happen because it'll start to alter the shape okay guys i'm going to show you this one more time for those that still are trying to catch on with the weave if you know what you're doing that is awesome go ahead and continue until you have a total of 13 that would be 1 2 3 4 5 that's what i have total you'll want to do 13 of those okay i'll meet you there but one more time with this weave i'm going to fold it straight behind all the wires hold that wire down the room and then slide it back around and through to that bottom base wire but i'll wrap it twice one and two and then this time i'm going to only wrap it around those two wires here including the base wire that'll make three and then back around that single base wire one okay give everything a nice gentle pinch all right so just continue that weave until we have 13 total ending with the weaves on the base wire okay i'll meet you guys there all right so i finished my weave i measured it just in case you guys want to measure yours it's about 24 millimeters in length and this is a good length for my six millimeter to change okay so now that you have your weave all nice and ready what we're going to do is we are going to remove these short scrap wires so go ahead and grab your chain nose pliers hold your weave really good i like to hold it at this edge right here just in case something gets pulled out of place and then pull all right and you will see your weave magically come to life it creates this really cool effect last one and there are our sunshine rays these wires right here we can go ahead and clip off i like to clip it off so it's kind of on the bottom i'm going to grab my wire cutters and clip that as close as i can and then remembering to pinch in that sharp edge and then same on this side all right so now we can go ahead and add that pinching bead so to make our little sun you're just going to bend these two wires down okay this will help lock in our bead this longer wire the smooth wire here is going to go on top as we gently kind of work the wires around okay i'm literally just mushing these two wires and at that point i kind of just like to work on one side and then the other so i'm going to grab the smooth wire and what we're going to do here is we're gently going to frame the outside of the bead the arm is going to gently curve it around i'm using my thumb to kind of guide the curved shape to get it nice and smooth once you get to the bottom make sure that that ugly little bend right there in the wire is covered up and then when we're at the top here i like to kind of do this cool like layer or double wire effect so i'm just going to start to trace the outside of the wire that i already did and i'll kind of give it this little spirally sunshine effect and then we're just going to stop here at now we can go ahead and start pushing this to frame the outside of the back of the bead okay just kind of push and pull until you get it all the way around the bead and it meets up at the top part okay at the very end i just like to grab my chain nose pliers and just kind of give it one last little tug and then try my best to turn that up to where it'll be lined up in the center all i did was just gently with my chain nose pliers twisted it up okay so now we have this little tail right here that this wire will wrap around so to make sure we don't pull these wires out of place i'm gonna hold these with my left hand to the best of my ability that's getting kind of small and slippery at this moment and we're gonna try our best and i'm just going to kind of push and pull using my thumb to kind of like push that down and then just twisting that wire around everything is nice and tight and super and once i get to the back i'll go ahead and clip it off with my wire cutters and of course we'll pinch it in so there are no sharp edges so i knew there was something i was forgetting whenever i went over the materials in the beginning of the video and i'll make sure to um add a little clip in so you guys won't forget either this is just a small piece of a 16 gauge thick copper wire i know a lot of you guys probably don't have this because it's a really odd gauge to work with so feel free to use like um an 18 gauge one millimeter wire or you can even use 20 gauge if that's all that you have because what we need to do since our cloud is so much longer than our sunshine we need to add something fun here to extend the sun to make it the same length and that's what we're going to do with this wire we're going to make a little curl for it to attach onto that way our sun and our cloud will be the same length so in order to do that this is a three and a half inch piece of copper 16 gauge wire which is 1.25 millimeters for everyone out there in europe and i'm just going to grab my round nose pliers and start to make like a big fun swirl okay so just grab it on the tip and work it little by little okay you don't have to create all in one go um try your best just to pinch as gently as possible i mean you're going to leave some little nibby marks right here that's just what's going to happen even if you've been wire wrapping for years and years um just try to be as gentle as you can so we are going to close that circle up so that none of the um design falls apart like the sun slipping off of it okay so whenever i make my swirls i just twist a little bit at a time to make sure that the wire is going to move the way that i want it to because like i mentioned before sometimes the wire just gets weird it'll have a random hard spot which makes your design wonky so i just like to do this in a very controlled fashion as i can see here that space is again a little too big so i'm just going to punch in and try to control this row the best that i can let's just see how that's gonna look with our sun the sun will be hanging down off of it i just don't like how there's a big gap right here so you can just go and like i'm doing with around those wires and gently pinch little by little kind of manipulating the swirl to get to the style that you like sometimes that makes it better and you know sometimes it actually makes it worse it all depends on the mood of the wire that day so once you get a swirl shape and size like that let me go ahead and measure that for you guys so you have an idea so it's just under 0.75 at the point where i'm going to pinch around those wires so you just want to choose a spot that's going to line up in the center of the design where the sun will be hanging and then i start by pushing the wire it's easier when you're working with heavier gauges reposition around those wires if things start to slip or wiggle i'm actually kind of balancing it on my thumb that's new i don't think i've done that before but maybe it works all right and just keep pushing that wire around okay it doesn't matter if it's on the front or the back we're going to clip that off so that it lines up perfectly with that wire that is crossing into all right and i have my heavy duty wire cutters here you don't want to use your delicate wire cutters on heavier wires like the 16 gauge wire it'll mess them up these are a bit chunkier but i'm going to get in there the best that i can to clip that off and then use my chain nose pliers to kind of straighten everything out and then we'll hold everything up together before we finish anything just to see if the size of the two earrings are going to be roughly the same so yeah i think once we create that little loop for the sun it will line up perfectly so let me give you guys an exact height of the swirl so it ends up being pretty much 0.75 tiny bit more in millimeters we are at two okay two centimeters not two millimeters so bringing back our hammer and anvil and yeah you can skip this step if you don't have it no need to worry but i really do like to hammer these little swirls i love the effect that it gives it um it's what i like to call a cursive swirl so we are going to focus the hammering on one side more than the other and it's going to give it this really cool like a calligraphy effect so i'm going to show you guys how to do that so you can either hammer on the front or the back that just depends on if you want a smooth finish or the little like bumpy finish i'm going to be hammering on the back of mine so we are going to hammer all over a bit first remember to just watch your fingers okay just enough to give all of it kind of a bit of a hammering and now i am really going to hammer on this outer side here now you don't want to hammer in the same spot repeatedly you just want to keep moving the hammer over and over that way you're distributing the pressure evenly and it should help create like a more even effect on the wire it's going to look something a bit like this remember try to hold it as best as you can without smashing your fingers okay so and as you can see now that edge right there is a lot more flat and fat than the other ones and you're just going to keep repeating the hammering process until you get the shape that you want um after you do that you may have to bend it back into shape because hammering can distort the shape a bit but that's all right all right so i'm just going to go ahead and finish mine up and then i'll meet you guys back there to finish everything up i'm going to push this down a little bit be careful if you're adjusting things because once you've hammered the wire the wire is a lot less flexible and forgiving so just be gentle with any movements that you make at this point in the design make sure that the gap right here is nice and closed up that's where our earring hook is going to go and we don't want that slipping off all right we are ready to put everything together so let's grab our little sunshine and what we're going to do before we attach it is we are going to bring some life to these little rays right here so you can do this with your round nose pliers or if you have needle nose pliers those work really great for this effect too i think most of you guys have round nose pliers so i'm going to go ahead and show you how it's done with that but it's the same technique i just want to show you that everything is possible so just take the round nose pliers gently pinching you don't want to pinch too hard and we are just going to twist up and that's for the little ones you can move it into place if you need to for the big ones i like to twist down and then move to the top part and twist up so it kind of has a two-way twist going or a two-way bend now for these little ones i like to kind of alternate so the last one i twisted up this one i'm twisting down feel free to do your own thing and not listen to me too that is totally okay this is just how i do it all right guys just repeat this process all these teeny tiny rays around the sun and then this little guy will be ready to be attached on to that swirl completing our design and since we do have an odd number i just repeat on this one see how i bent it down i just repeat that because i like for these top two ones to be the same it just makes me happy all right here we go and there is our wavy little sun and he is ready to go home on this big swirl that we created so keeping around those pliers we are going to make a loop okay so gently gripping i'm just going to twist it down and then push this wire up and around just to kind of get a loop shape going and then like we did before with that blue bead i'm going to keep creating a loop but kind of off to add a diagonal okay so that there's a little gap for us to slide the sunshine on but we already have our circle shape so it'll make the rest of the loopy part easier whenever we need to wrap everything around just make sure that there is like a little gap there that way we can slide everything on something like this poke the wire down through the top and then twist and it should be on there in the right direction once you're there you can go ahead and grab your chain nose pliers and kind of just wiggle that close it into place and then keep holding that back side of the wire because that's the one that's going to want to move as you pull this around to close everything up and since this is a thicker wire it should be good for just one wrap around the finishing on the back so we can cut it off and punch everything in make sure everything is even and lined up there we go so now all we got to do is put our little earring hooks on i am going to oxidize mine first if you guys want to know how to create the antique finish that i do on copper jewelry you can check out that video i'll put a link up here in the top for you guys it's a video on oxidizing it's really easy all you have to do is buy some liver of sulfur gel and you'll be able to create cool antique jewelry at your house so i hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial i hope it brings some spring vibes to your day spring is just around the corner and let me know if you have any questions or if i missed any steps and you need a closer look at anything all right guys have fun i'll see you next time