Scarlet Hair Pin

Although I have been wire weaving in some way, shape, or form for some time now, this is the first time I have actually attempted to create any sort of hair accessory. Although I very rarely do anything more complicated than a braid with my hair, I have always enjoyed seeing elaborate hairstyles with some rather fascinating pieces of decoration holding them in place. So, I decided to attempt an elaborate hair pin. Red being my favorite color and the rainbow contest being the only one that seemed plausible for this project, I (obviously) started hunting through my (far too large and yet not nearly large enough) collection of beads looking for anything red. In the end, while it may not be quite to my satisfaction, I have completed a rather strongly red hair piece that may have been much more appropriate if I had made it around Valentines Day. Oh well, inspiration struck, and if I put off a project, I very rarely get around to it. So without further ado, enough with my rambling, and let's get to the project!

Being a wire weaving project, I obviously used wire to make the frame. Personally, I prefer using fine silver to sterling silver for its better flexibility, and to my untrained eye, the two are remarkably similar in appearance. Due to being softer, one of its most desirable qualities for this project, fine silver also unfortunately scratches quite easily, so I would strongly suggest using tool magic or its equivalent to rubber coat the tips of your tools. While this is completely up to you, I find that my overall satisfaction with a piece is drastically improved with fewer mars that can easily be avoided with a small investment in the rubberizer and occasionally your time when you need to re-coat them. For this project I used:

- Two seven inch pieces of fourteen gauge wire

- Two eight inch pieces of sixteen gauge wire

- One seven and a half inch piece of fourteen gauge wire

- And enough 28 gauge wire to bind the crystals in place

Then for the crystals, I used a variety of Swarovski and off brand crystals to decorate the frame. I did not purchase anything new for this project, so I do not know the exact dimensions of the crystals, but I believe that both the bicones and the hearts are 10mm, so the teardrops must have been somewhere in the range of 15mm. I ultimately used:

-Two 10mm(I believe) Swarovski crystal hearts

-Three perhaps 15mm Swarovski crystal teardrops

-And four 10mm(I believe) off brand crystal bicones.

Of course, I also used a great variety of tools, but I will try to list the ones I know I used:

-Wire cutters, one heavy duty pair and one light

-Pliers, all of the usual jewelry pliers, but to name a few, bent-nose, needle-nose, and round-nose

-A ruler and marker for measuring wire

-A ring mandrel for shaping

-A steel bench block and hammer

-And, of course, the always trusty torch and related necessities

I will try to name the tools I used as I go along in case I have missed anything here.

There are two primary area's I use for working on my bench. First, I have a flat table surface that I do most of my weaving on. I use softer surfaces to cover the wood bench, namely, a scrap of leather for when using files, and a jewelry mat that you can get at most beading stores for less than a dollar. Then there is my torching set up. I use torches for a lot of my jewelry making, and it is very beneficial to have a permanent place set up to work on. I use a honeycomb board on top of a battered cookie sheet on top of rubber feet. Behind and to one side of the honeycomb board are two bricks from Home Depot to create a heatproof backdrop to torch against. To hold the metal, I use a third hand with locking tweezers. To the right of the set up I have tweezers, solder picks, and fluxing brushes. Finally, I have a quenching bowl behind the setup and a spray bottle to the side for cooling off the working area enough to arrange more pieces of metal without being worried about getting burned. This is not a rigid set up, and those of you who do jewelry frequently will likely have your own workspace set up in a way that works for you.

Once again, this step is likely unnecessary for anyone who works with torches frequently, but for the sake of things, I should probably include the basics of how to safely use a torch. For the most part, torch safety includes the obvious. Wear eye protection and gloves, don't touch the barrel of the torch, use a heatproof backdrop to use the torch against, keep water and a fire extinguisher nearby, etc. There are, however, a few that did not intuitively occur to me. Always keep the window open while using a torch (as learned when the fire alarm went of), make sure that the bowl you are using for quenching is thermal shock proof (as learned when a bowl split in half while I was quenching a ball of metal), seems obvious enough, but not just the torch and the metal are hot, be careful when touching the third hand/brick enclosure/soldering board and quite possibly keep a spray bottle on hand if you want to do multiple soldering/melting/whatever else on the same surface within a short amount of time (multiple burns). Other than that, I would suggest not keeping anything flammable around the torching enclosure (fortunately not learned from experience), and do not use tape to hold wires together (bad idea, and yes, there is a reason why I know this), no matter how far above the actual area it is, use binding wire instead like you're supposed to. So many of the things I have tried doing and should not have are quite likely intuitively obvious to most people out there, but, knowing that I made these mistakes, I will at least put them out there in hopes that other people can avoid the same embarrassing situations.

This is usually the step that I do the worst. I plan, I measure, I put it down on paper, I even think through the minute little details, and then I do something entirely different. I suppose it works as a good starting point, but I have wondered if I should just skip this step if it really does me no good in the end.

The base I was working from was the hair pin that my mother already had, so I started with initial measurements from that. The stick itself was six inches long and the Celtic knot was four and a half. From those measurements, I drew a grid on a piece of paper, and sketched roughly what I wanted it to look like. You can judge for yourselves how closely the drawing matches the final product.

To start the frame, I took the two seven inch pieces of fourteen gauge wire, marked them in the middle, and taped the ends together to get matching results. (tape before torching, good idea, tape while torching, bad idea) Then I bent the wire into an "S" shape as shown around the size 12 1/2 mark on my ring mandrel.

To start the process to get the interlocking hearts shape I wanted, I melted each end individually. I am not sure why I did this, as I am going to melt the balls together anyway, but that's what I did, and you can be smarter than me and just skip this step. Once the balls are melted (or before) interlock the two wires to get roughly the shape shown above and then bend the ends to touch in a heart shape.

Using binding wire (not tape!) to hold the shape you made in the last step together, position the pair of hearts in the third hand and make sure that the ends are touching. I just crossed the ends of mine. Then using the torch, heat up the ends until they melt together into a ball. This takes a while, so you may want to be prepared to sit with your hand in the same position for several minutes before you start. Then, clip off the binding wire and fiddle with the hearts to make them look roughly even.

Take the two eight inch 16ga wires and ball the ends. Thread them through the loops in the middle and on either side bend them up so that all four ends are on the top of the frame. On either side, cross the wires in the middle and loop them around to the back about half an inch from the balls at the end of the hearts. Cross the wires again, going down this time to create two more heart shapes, and wrap the remaining wire around the base hearts twice, ending with the ends on top again, each ball nearly touching the middle loops. This is the completion of the frame.

Before I added the crystals, I bent the frame. I started by using a roll of packing tape and easing the frame across the curve. Later I went back and bent it more, but having a mold to start with helps to make an even shape.

Now that the frame was done, I embellished it. Using a variety of the red crystals I found in my drawers, I started by laying out the crystals I wanted. I ended up choosing two red Swarovski teardrops to go on the middle loops, four off brand red bicones to go in the middle spaces, and two red Swarovski hearts to go inside the smaller hearts on the frame. From there I used 28ga fine silver wire to lash the crystals to the frames. For the teardrops I went over and under the loops, going through the hole as often as possible. For the bicones, I was able to pass a wire through the middle and use a simple lash to secure it on either side. Finally, for the hearts I almost ended up doing a figure eight around where the wires crossed again to hold the hearts securely in the middle. I am sorry I don't have any names to give you for the lashes, but the only name I have ever found is "lashing" and I have taken that to mean wrap the wire around something else tightly enough to hold it in place. Some look better than others, but all of the lashing I have ever tried ends up being a figure it out as you go thing.

While the body of the hair pin is cool, it unfortunately doesn't do much good without the pin itself. So, I made a pin to match. Using a seven and a half piece of fourteen guage wire, start by balling one end. Then, using a variety of pliers (although I primarily used bail making pliers), bend the balled end of the wire into a shape that hugs the final Swarovski teardrop. Using a rawhide mallet and then a ball peen hammer, work harden, and then flatten the long part of the pin. (also work harden the part to hold the crystal, but do not flatten it, this will mess up the shape you made to hold the crystal, and once it's flattened, it's really hard to fix) Then lash the teardrop to the shape the same way you lashed them to the frame. (unfortunately, I overestimated how long the wire needed to be. I would suggest using six and a half instead of seven and a half in retrospect.)

Ta-daa! Although it still really doesn't look much like the original drawing, I think it turned out pretty well. The frame ended up being smaller than the one I was starting from, and the pin was longer, so I would probably mess with the proportions a bit if I did it again, however, it's a fully functional hair pin on my first try! More than I can say for a lot of other things I've tried in the past!

-Nene Granato