Eureka! (and a bit of Duh!)

Don’t you just love those moments when you suddenly realise something that now appears to be so obvious? I don’t get them that often but was luckily enough to have one this week. On the one hand I feel so stupid but on the other so excited!

This idea came from a couple of necklaces I designed (in thread). I initially had a play a week or so ago and was waiting for the beads that I had ordered to arrive. This week I set out to make them properly in wire. As always I started off full of energy and enthusiasm. Two attempts later I was feeling a bit less so!

My initial idea came from this book:

and in particular this design:

It looks simple enough except I couldn’t quite work out how! I  started off with 2 ‘bands’ and attempted to add the loops with no success!

I initially was going to put the loops on to the little rings.

This is a plain one but I used a larger hook

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I then decided to look at the diagrams a bit more carefully…. and that is when lightning struck – why don’t I work around the necklace the other way. In other words instead of working all around the total length of necklace each time, work the width. As I said – not exactly earth shattering but enough to radically alter my work. Oh and it worked:

I worked from one end to the other end, (about 2 double crochets on each line!)

As you can see it is still not totally finished – I need to work on making the loops tighter so there is no room for the beads to slip around BUT…. the loops work – HOORAY!

I don’t like the necklace but really feel that this technique has great potential. Here is a bracelet that I made which works a bit better:

I got the loops tighter so the beads don’t slip.

Here it is being modeled.

I have further plans of which I am really excited about but you will have to wait a bit longer for these, sorry!

Finally, I wish to thank Mrs A and Jan from handcrafted by Picto. Their comments gave me another ‘duh’ moment when I felt a bit silly (well, OK really silly). In my last post I mentioned that the Ganny Square Necklace started out as a bracelet but it didn’t fit. These wonderful people gave me the very simple solution – add in extra chain to make it fit. See, DUH why could I not think of that? Instead of chain I added extra beads:

So what do you think? I think brilliant!

Your comments are always really useful to me and I really appreciate the time you take to do it. Thank you. If anyone has an obvious great idea that I have missed again then do please tell me – as you can see I am not always that good at identifying the obvious! 🙂

Do please join me as I now head over to Handmade Monday on Handmade Harbour where, amongst many others you will find the brilliant Mrs A and Jan. It really is worth a visit.