Part 2: Adding Hammered Wire Dangle Frame Pendant Tutorial

All right, so welcome to part two of the video. In part one we made this basic cabochon pendant and in part two we are going to make this frame, this kind of dangly movable frame that hangs around it and we're going to attach it to the pendant. So let's go ahead and get started. I'm going to be using these three tools here. I have my wire cutters which are Swanstrom brand and then I have round nose pliers and regular pliers. These are the Lindstrom tools. These are RX 7590 and then these are RX 7890. The wire I'm going to be using is 18 gauge round dead soft copper wire. I like the 18 gauge because it's a little thicker and I'm and it allows me to just kind of add more texture to it because it flattens more because it's thicker. So I'm going to start with one piece of that 18 gauge wire and it measures eight inches long and here I have the pendant from my previous video. This is from the part one video so if you want to see how to make this make sure to watch that and now I'm going to use this wire to add onto it. So what I want to do is curve it around my pendant but I don't want it to be like super tight. I want there to be space between this wire and the pendant because I want it to just kind of hang and dangle around. So the first thing I'm doing is almost like folding my wire in half to start giving it this little curve and I'm just kind of guiding it with my fingers curving it. Now I'm going to see how that is around my pendant. So where the ends of this wire we are going to trim them down a little bit but they're going to be attaching right here. So just kind of take a look at that as well as how this frame is looking around your pendant. You want there to be a little bit of space so that this dangles around your stone like so but you probably don't want like a ton of space and also if you're going to hammer like I am that kind of is going to add a little bit of space too. So let's see I think this is good like that. So what I'm going to do now is hammer this and then I'm going to come back and check because hammering kind of distorts the size a little bit. So I'm going to go ahead and not focus here on the top because we are going to be making little loops with the ends of the wire here so I'm just even going to have it hang off my iron block. So this is my iron block that I'm going to hammer on and I'm going to focus just kind of on the sides and the bottom of this as I hammer and then this is my chasing hammer. It has a flat edge and a kind of curved rounded edge so for texture I'm going to hammer with the curved rounded edge. So just to show you what's happening here this is the texture that I'm getting. If you don't like that texture and you just want to have it like be nice and smooth feel free to use this side. It's going to still flatten it a little bit but it's going to give it a smoother look or feel free to just not even hammer it at all if you wish. So I'm going to continue this off camera and just put this texture all the way around. So one thing I want to point out if you did hammer like I did a lot of times it kind of curves the piece like this so you just want to basically uncurve it and make this wire straight again. I think just the pressure from the hammer can just curve the wire so go ahead and straighten that back out nice and flat and now that we've hammered it sometimes it gets a little wider sometimes the shape changes so we just want to see how that looks around our stone. Again just kind of envision these wires connecting up here. All right so just checking that there is an adequate amount of space. If you need to widen it you just kind of go like this to widen it up you can also adjust the shape if you need to slightly and so I'm going to open mine up just a bit more because you do want it to have that sort of freedom of movement. You don't want it to be getting stuck on the edges when it's dangling so you want spacing kind of all around so this should be good. So what I'm going to do now is basically here where my wires are crisscrossing this is where I want to trim them and you can trim them one at a time or both at the same time it's up to you. This is where I'm going to trim them and now I'm going to take my round nose pliers and what I'm going to do is I'm going to take one of these at a time and I want to kind of note where I'm doing it because I want to make a loop but I want to make the same loop on each side so as I'm making the loop you don't want the loop to be super tiny either because again that freedom of movement so I'm just taking note that I'm making it right here you can even mark on your round nose pliers if you wish where you're making that loop so here's my loop and I just want to do the same thing here on the other side I want to have the same shape size loop. Alright so for me it's easier to make a full loop just to make sure it's all good and then kind of open and close the loop even though theoretically you know I could have left the loop open but for me it's just easier to do it this way and now open up these loops like so and now what we want to do is put the loops through here one on each side alright so one on the left one on the right they're just gonna kind of hook around here like so and now we can come back in and just close that back up and the reason we wanted the loops to be on the larger side is so it's not tight and it has that freedom of movement here you can see that so as you're closing up the loop you want the end of the wire to go into the wire itself you don't want it to be on the side where you can see the wire sticking out so if that happens just adjust that alright and now that the loops are both closed here is our little dangle. Alright so that's it now it just kind of dangles around has a lot of movement and then when you wear it it'll just be you know flat up against the body and the pendant will sit inside of this frame that we made but then it can just kind of move like this so feel free to experiment with this you can probably add these sort of framed dangles to other designs not just this one but other designs that have little gaps for you to attach it to as well and you can also add multiples so we can have another one going just right alongside going around as well so you can add multiple of these dangly frames so here i added an additional frame i just did the same exact thing that i demonstrated in this video for the second frame but i just made it a little bit bigger a little bit wider so it would sit here on the outer edge of everything so it's up to you whether you think that's like too many wires at this point or whether you like that and also feel free to experiment with adding little beads to these wire frames as well that would be fun they could be sitting here on the bottom for example they just have to have a large enough hole to fit on the wire i personally like it with just one frame like this but i wanted to show you so that you can decide before you went ahead and made additional frames whether you like that better or not so that is it if you enjoyed this video please leave me a like down below and don't forget to subscribe i post new videos every weekend thank you so much for watching and i'll see you next time bye