Go to www.beadaholique.com to purchase beading supplies and to get design ideas!
Hi this is Megan with Beadaholique.com
I'm going to show you the new artistic wire finding forms
that we've got in and I'm going to show you one as an example of how to actually do
it
but as you can see we have a really wide variety of different
styles here and we have some that are ear wires
some that are like a connector link or
an earring chandelier finding. We have
some clasps. There's a whole bunch of different ones and I'm just gonna
show you one as an example. They all come with pretty good instructions
so you should be able to adapt it to
whichever style you get. I'll just open this up
The one I'm gonna show you is the oval ear wire
It's a really nice versatile earring finding. One of the more
basic ones. Be careful you don't lose this little
metal cylinder here. It's kind of loose in there
so the jigs are nice and small, compact
they don't have a lot of extra plastic on them. It should be easy to store them
these are great if you
wanna make your own findings and they will let you make them
quickly and they're also going to make it so that they're uniform. So your two
earring
hooks will always be the same size and shape and that's really
really great especially if you're selling jewelry it can be a big time saver
so here I have the instructions and they're really clear and they have photos
so on the package
it does give you a recommended gauge range for your wire
so for this earring hook it says 22 to 24 gauge
I would probably stick to 20 or 22 because they're soft and if you use a
24 you're gonna need to do a lot of hardening
to get your wire to be nice and firm. I'm using 20 gauge
so just following along with what they got on here
my end of my wire is kinda mangled. I'll just cut that off
it says
to use a five inch piece of wire. I always use a little bit more than I think
I'm going to need
now we're going to insert the end of our wire
through the little hole, there's only one hole
in this one. So it's pretty easy. Bend it down
and hold onto it on the back and now
all you do is follow along with the instructions. It's going to tell you
what path to wrap your wire around. You just do
it exactly in the order that it says. So for this particular one
you're going to wrap clockwise around the large pin
and then you're going to pivot around the smaller pin. That's
gonna give you the bend at that bottom of your ear wire
and now wrap around the
oval and once you do your first bend you can let go of the back
when you're doing
any kind of jig work it's helpful to kinda wrap past where you need
to get your wire to really hug
the shape. Then you're going to
pivot back and you're going to wrap around the little triangle and that's gonna give you
the little kick back at the end of the hook
so once you have your piece wrapped around
you're going to take this little cylinder
they call it the pusher tool. What it's for is
to push the wire flat
when you go around in a spiral and you wrap all the way around
you going to be layering on top and your wire will
go up and so you wanna take the little tool and just push the wire down flat and
make sure that it's
nice and snug to the back. When you're done
unbend the little piece at the back
pop off your earring hook
you can kinda tweak it a little bit
make sure the shape is how you like. I'm just going to
clip at the loop
then you're just going clip at the end here
now if you're doing a clasp
or a connector link or something as long as you've got your
ends not sharp you're good but on
a earring hook you're always gonna wanna make sure that you prepare that
earring hook to go into somebody's ear. So there are several different ways you
can do it
you can use a cup bur, you can
use a diamond file, that what I have, you can just use a nail file
If you don't have those things all you gonna do, if you have a cup bur
then you probably know how to use it. We do have a video on how to use it if you
don't
otherwise just take your file
and you're just going to file diagonally
across the edges of the tip of the wire
and be careful that you don't scratch the rest of the wire if you're using a color
coated wire
because it will scratch off the finish, just right at the tip
and you can just kinda go all the way around the edges and you're just trying to
make sure that you get
that nice and smooth
go all the way around a few times. It shouldn't take that long
and once that feels nice and smooth and it doesn't scratch your finger at all and you
feel like it would be comfortable going in your earring
then you're done, you can make your second earring hook
now one thing with the soft wire like this
is it is, even with the 20 gauge
it's so pretty fluid and flexible. So there's a lot of ways you
can work harden that, you can use a wire whacker
you can hammer it with a nylon hammer, you can
tumble it if you have a tumbler. There's a lot of different ways to harden that, you
can also hammer
just the back part with a regular chasing hammer, it will flatten it out a little bit
the nylon options are going to keep the finish
nice and shiney without scratching the color but that's also up to you whether or
not you feel like it's strong enough
or that you need to harden it a little bit more
Go to www.beadaholique.com to purchase beading supplies and to get design ideas!