Hi there. Sandy here. Welcome to another Friday Findings video at my YouTube channel and my
blog, KeepsakeCrafts.net. Today I'm going to talk to you about a fun tool that you can
even use in your jewelry making. It's a wire jig.
So this is a wire jig and this is a simple, basic one. It's made out of plastic and it's
just a board with a grid of evenly spaced holes and your wire jig comes with these little
plastic pegs that fit in the holes and then you use it to make wire shapes. Because you
have all the pegs in place as you do your wraps, you can see this is the pattern I used
here, as you do your wire wraps it comes out consistent so you can make the same shape
over and over again. You can make several and connect them from links. You can make
all kinds of shapes. All of these over here were made on the wire jig. You can make decorative
swirly designs, you can make shapes like stars and angels and crosses and shamrocks. Flowers
are popular. I've seen all kinds of designs.
So it really works very simply. You just place the pegs in the board and then you wrap wire
around. Here I have some 22 gauge craft wire. It's a little thin for these shapes. You can
see it's pretty flexible so you really do want to use something a little heavier. I
was using this because it's easier to demonstrate with. So the way it works, you can work right
off your spool of wire. Some people like to start by making a loop, but I like to just
hold the tail down and then you just wrap around your pegs and you want to try to keep
the wire against the wire jig so that it comes out even and then you just wrap around the
pegs. It's that simple. So I'm pressing it down so they all come out consistent
and then the final wrap and then you can just pull the whole thing off.
Now you will find wire jigs in metals and some really heavy duty ones that you can do
a lot of heavy wire wrapping with. When you're done you just use your pliers to trim off
the excess and you can see now I have these two perfectly matching pieces that can be
used for a variety of things. Like here's one that could be used as a chandelier style
earring if you made a whole bunch of these, which was made just on these four pegs, they
would be a lovely connector, maybe just connecting a star pendant. These ones were made just
on a square of pegs on the board and this one was also made on a square of pegs only
instead of going around, I went back and forth and across.
This necklace and these earrings were made using a wire jig and it's just simply beads
and on the jig board I had three pegs which this wire was wrapped around, then I slid
on a bead and then wrapped the wire around another three pegs and I did that for small
beads, sections of beads for this or for the earrings or even for a big bead, which was
a little tricky to get the spacing right, but it worked out. And they are all connected
with these figure eight links which were made also on the wire jig, just wrapping around
two links repeatedly stacking them up and then you've got several of your little connectors.
So really it is a fun, practical tool for making your own connections. If you just did
these three loops and then left the wire straight, it would be a decorative head pin.
Now once you finish your pieces, you want to take some nylon jaw pliers and give all
the parts a good squeeze with the nylon jaw pliers. This does two things, it flattens
them out so everything in the piece is on the same plane and it also hardens it a bit
so that it will be a bit more durable in your design and you do need to pay attention to
how you use these. For example this one, you can see it's pretty weak that way, but you
could certainly use it in different directions or this one doesn't look like it's going to
hold together well, but wouldn't this be a fun frame for wire wrapping with very fine
gauge wire and then go around and maybe add some small beads.
If you do a search online for wire jig patterns you will find a multitude like I said before,
all kinds of shapes, words, figures, flowers, abstract design, links. You will find some
wire jigs that come with a large peg and you can actually use these to make ear wires so
you can make pair after pair of ear wires and make them all consistently and quickly
with the wire jig. It's a fun tool to play with and experiment and see what you can create
with it.
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Happy creating. Bye bye.