Part 1: Simple Cabochon Wire Wrapped Pendant Tutorial

Hi everybody, this is Axana. So this is going to be a two-part video. I thought it would be nice to break it down like this. And in this first part we are going to be making this pendant here, this simple little pendant. And this is going to be the part two, adding this little dangly frame that's going to go around the pendant. So let's go ahead and get started. If you want to see how I made this, just keep watching. I'm going to be using two tools here. I have my Swanstrom brand wire cutters to cut my wire. And then I have my pliers here, which are my Lindstrom RX7890 pliers. We're going to be using two types of wire. First is 20 gauge square dead soft copper wire. And next is a half round 24 gauge. These are both dead soft copper. They are both from RioGrande.com. And we're going to be using three pieces of that 20 gauge square. And they are about 11 and a half inches long. And my stone is a sunstone. It's kind of a darker red sunstone. And it's an oval shaped, but like an elongated oval. The shape isn't a huge deal. It can be, you know, a different shaped oval. It can be round. It can theoretically be a teardrop, but for this particular design, I feel like that's going to be more fiddly. So I would just stick with oval or round, at least your first time making it. And mine is about 35 millimeters, which is not quite an inch and a half, but almost. So it doesn't have to be this size, of course, but mine's just kind of, you know, skinny and tall. So you want to take your three wires and just kind of line them all up side by side here, like so, and find roughly the middle. So hold them kind of roughly in the middle. And then you want to take your half round wire. This is just connected to the spool. I just grabbed the little end of it. And the flat side down, the half rounded side up is how you want to work with this wire. And I'm just getting it started by wrapping the little end here around a few times to get it started. And then after that, you flip it over. If you notice that it's not quite in the middle, mine is a little bit to the right, so I need to move it to the left. All right, I think now it's a little bit more in the middle, so feel free to move it. So now you guide the wire. Let me zoom in a tiny bit for this part. You guide the wire and then you turn the other three wires to kind of wind it on there, like so. Okay, and you just need to do this for a little bit. This is just to hold the three wires together. So whatever looks good to you. It can be even, you know, smaller than this, but this is just kind of what I like the look of. So now we trim our wire ends so that they are both on the same side here. And now we press down on this whole little bit, including those wire ends, so that they do not stick up. All right, once you're satisfied with that. Here's the other side, by the way, without the wire ends. So the wire end part is what's going to be touching our stone, so we need to curve it because the oval has a curve on the bottom. So it's going to be like this, and the stone is going to sit in here, and the wire ends are in here, touching the stone. So this outer part does not have the wire ends. So what you want to do is see if that curve you made works for your stone. You might need to, you know, curve it some more or less. And then you kind of sit your stone in there, trying to center it more or less, and you bend your wire frame around the stone. So what I'm checking for here is that this little wrap on the bottom kind of stays centered. And I'll show you what to do if it's not perfectly centered, because I think mine isn't. So I'll adjust it a little bit, and I'll get to show that to you. But first, let's finish off the frame. So we want all the wires to come together here at the top. Feel free to lay this down onto like a flat surface, that will be helpful. And then you bring the wires together here at the top, and you just kind of bend a little side to side until they all come together here. All right, so there's a few things going on here that I need to fix that I want to show you. First of all, these wires here are starting to kind of curve inwards, so that this flat side, because the wire's square, so it's got, you know, the flat edges of a square, and then the corners of a square. So because it's starting to turn, the little corner starting to be here, you can see this top wire has the flat edge, and this one has the corner. So I'm going to grab it like this with my pliers, and I'm going to turn it this way to get that flat edge facing me instead of the corner. Hopefully you saw that difference on the camera. So now I'm just kind of reinforcing the bends here in my frame so that the wires are coming together nicely just here at the top. And this little wrap on the bottom, I left it a little bit misaligned so I can show you how to fix it. So it's a little bit more to the right here, maybe like two wraps extra here on the right. So all you do, this is why I like making these a little bit on the longer side, is you can just unravel. You can alternatively try to like push it, but sometimes that can be tricky and it might not want to move. If it is on the shorter side, it's going to be more likely to move, so you can try that. So you can try that, but because mine is on the longer side, I just got rid of a little bit of wire here. I trimmed it and I pressed down that wire end, and let's see now. Now it looks to be more centered to me. All right, so now we are going to wrap here where all three wires are coming together. Make sure they're not crisscrossing, just going straight up the sides and then coming together, just three wires on one side on top of those three wires on the other side. So you have the two wires that you can see in the front here, then you can see all three from the side, and then here's the back. So with the half round wire, again the flat side down and the rounded side up, we are going to start wrapping to connect them together. Let's push that tighter like so, and I'm going to give it just one more little wrap, and then I'm going to put it through from back to front, just through that little gap of the frame here, and now I'm going to pull on that. I'm going to also just press on this as well, and you can either just trim that off right now or if you want to trim it later, it's up to you, but eventually all you do is just trim that off, that little tail end, and I'm going to give it just one more little wrap. This doesn't look like a lot of wraps to me for such a large stone, not that it's that large, but it's just kind of tall I mean. There we go, I think that looks good. So I'm going to take the two front most wires here, I'm just going to bend them forward a little bit. What I'm going to do actually is I'm going to move these wires into position as well, that way they're not in our way. So I'm going to take the second wire, so this is the first front most wire, this is the second middle most wire, so I'm going to take that wire on each side and I'm going to put it to the side like this, all right, and then the back most wires I'm going to bend them back like that. So now these two front most wires, they're ever so slightly bent forward, kind of how they're going to be when I make the bail, and nothing's in the way so you can easily get in there to keep wrapping this wire around. So I'm going to turn the piece and guide the wire around only those two wires now, and in the beginning usually some gaps form. So before we get too far here I'm just going to come in there and push on that to get rid of those gaps, and now I'm going to continue to wrap around my bail, and if more gaps form I'm going to push down to get rid of them before it gets too far because it's going to be harder to do that the longer this is, so you want to get rid of any gaps right away. All right, so I'm going to do this for about three quarters of an inch so that it's long enough to be bent into my bail shape, so all I'm going to be doing is just guiding the wire and turning the piece. It's just going to be very repetitive, so I'm going to be doing this off camera just over and over and over like this. So when that's tall enough, here on the back portion is where you trim and have your wire end. So this is the front, here in the back, press down, and then just press down on the whole thing. By the way, feel free to be pressing down on just as you were making the bail. If you wanted to just wrap a little and then press, wrap a little, then press, that's okay too. I know in my recent video about bails I do recommend that if you have trouble with the wires separating on your bail, just to kind of press down as you go to lock that little wrap in place. All right, so that's looking good. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to lock in my stone. So I'm going to pop that in there like so. I'm going to come in here on the back, grab just the back most wires, and just put a little bend in them like so. There we go. And then on the front, wedging my pliers in there so I have just the front most wire, and then once I get down here to the bottom, I'm going to just turn my wrist and put a little bend in that wire like so. All right, and now just for the other side, come down here and put a little bend in it. Now you just want to double check your bends that they are kind of similar. I think this one needs to be just a little more of a sharper bend. And basically you're trapping in your edges now and your stone is trapped. Double check by pushing on the back. If it still pops out, you need to bend these more so they're trapping the edges in more. Once they trap them enough, the stone will feel very secure and it won't wobble or anything. So what we want to do now is get rid of these back most wires. So we're lining them up kind of nicely side by side like this. Then we're going to grab them with our pliers and we are going to kind of bend up like this and push down. All right, so bend up and push down. And what that's going to allow is a really tight squeeze right here where you don't have a big gap. Okay, so instead of just bending those wires down, which is going to form like a big curve and a big gap, the reason I did it the way that I did it is this makes them nice and flat up against the rest of my piece because I'm just trying to get rid of these wires and I want them to be the least noticeable. And now I'm trimming them off and all you're left with is just this tiny little kind of bump here on the back from your wires. Okay, so you can just kind of press down on them and there we have it. Next, I want to line these up so they are very symmetrical. Okay, you don't want one higher than the other. You want it to just form like a perfect line for this next portion. Okay, once you do that, you take this, you curve it into your bail shape. So I like to just kind of manually bend it by hand but feel free to bend it around something. Once you start coming down here, I take the ends and I just kind of curve them to work them through that gap. Alright, so this is my bail. I'm going to just press down right here and the wires here on the front, I'm going to just press up on them a little bit. My pliers are obviously kind of in the way so I'm going to remove my pliers and continue to just kind of pinch them. And there you have your bail. There shouldn't be a gap here. We've kind of pinched this closed and there is plenty of room in this bail for your necklace to fit through. So what you want to do now is you want to take these wires and first of all, I'm going to make sure that they are just kind of nice and side by side there. Then I'm going to separate them out and bring one to the right, one to the left. I'm just taking a peek that they're still nice and symmetrical. And then remember how I mentioned before that like the corner, there's a corner and the flat edge. If your wire happened to turn, you just want to turn it so the flat side is facing you and not the corner, which mine are doing right now anyways, but if they weren't. So now what we're going to do is take the wires and start to bend them from front to back, making sure that they are still looking symmetrical. Okay, and you know one isn't taller than the other, just looks nice and even. So then here, if we look at it from the side, it's basically wrapping around this wire and on the other side as well. So you just want to come in there and trim, but leave a little end just like that so that that little end can kind of finish closing up this little loop that's forming around the wire that's sticking out. All right, so that's one side I trimmed and now the other side I trimmed as well. And then you just come in here with your pliers and you grab that little end. You kind of curve it this way to continue that loop and then you just press down on it and then see how that little loop is closed now? And then same thing here, grab the little wire end on this side, curve it this way, and then just kind of press down and close that loop. Now if the wire end, it's happened on this side but not so much on the other side, see the little wire end here? It's kind of sticking out a little bit so I'm just going to press on that. Just press it down so that way the wire end is going into this wire rather than being slightly on the side and you won't see it from the front. All right, so now we're just going to take our side wires here and just start bending them downwards one at a time, just a little bit with each one to make sure that it's nice and even. And then once it looks nice and even and here the wires are crisscrossing, also kind of in a centered way, we're going to take the wire and bend it towards the back. Again, just trying to ensure that you're bending it in the same sort of location that one isn't bent higher than the other. And then you just flip it to the back and here are those wires. So just trim but leave an end so that you can take that wire end, here are my little ends, and grab it with your pliers, turn it inwards into here, into this gap, and then we're going to press down, essentially just tucking away that wire end and just kind of wrapping this around the edge of your stone. All right, so curve it inwards and then just press it into that gap, press down, tuck it away like this. So from the front it looks like that. So now we're done with part one of the video. We've created this simple little cabochon pendant with kind of a heart shape at the top. And in part two, which is the next video posted, feel free to move on to that if you wish to embellish this pendant a little bit more. But also feel free to leave it as it is if you're happy with it, just like this. But in part two I'm going to add some movement to the pendant. I'm going to add some dangles, so do check that out. And as always, thank you for watching my video. Please don't forget to like down below and subscribe, and I'll see you next time. Bye!