Happy New Year, this is Brandon reporting from Ohio. Which is actually rather fortunate, because that is where I already have the subjects of this article premade, years ago. It all started in seminary, where one of the people there brought a coil of wire and made a ring. Rings are pretty cool! Of course, I have since made more than rings, but it is a good starting place.
To start with, wrap some wire around your finger. You want to keep it loose, so that it will fit when you add more to it later. Once you have the band is thick enough, give yourself about more five inches of wire, and clip it off from the coil. If you can’t find your pliers with the wire clipping part, just wiggle the wire back and forth at one spot, and it will snap right off.
Now, you should have two ends to the wire in your hand. Take the one that is shorter, and wrap it around the ring, like you see in the above picture. Note how the end of the wire is pointing outwards. This is crucial to not pricking yourself, a quality not to be scoffed at in a ring. Unless, of course, you coat the pokey bit in poison and give it to your enemy. Anyways, once that end is wrapped up, take the long end of wire and start wrapping the ring from where you left off. You want to keep it loose initially, so that you don’t end up with a bulge that you really can’t do too much about.
Note again how the end is pointing outward. This is where you clip it, or go for another wrap around the ring before clipping it. Tada, you now have a ring. That might not be enough for you. Would you perhaps be interested in a chain?
Simply make a ring, then make another circle of wire that passes through it as you make it into another ring. If you take this to its logical conclusion, you can make chainmail armor using similar methods. If you do, please send me a picture, I would really like to see it.
Or you could take the classy route. Go to a rocks and minerals show, buy cool things, and wrap enough wire around it that it stays on the ring. I wouldn’t recommend proposing with such a creation; it still tends to look rather shoddy. Jewelers have jobs for a reason.
Instead, listen to your inner child and make wire people who may or may not obey you. Once you have the skeleton down, you can then wrap wire around to make it more fleshed out. Of course, that uses a lot of wire, so you might just settle for a wire skeleton and use something like, oh say, hot glue to give it more substance.
You know, as I am writing this, I realized I should have made that dragon thing over there into a backpack for one of the guys. That would have been pretty cool, but I guess I had to go with giving it legs.
A warning about working with wire: it will always be rounded at the edges. It just doesn’t bend sharply enough to really emulate claws or fingers on a small scale.
As you can see, working with two kinds of wire can give you nice contrasts. You may also notice that the legs were rather long, and now the wings are somewhat more proportional. That tends to happen, but since this is an additive art, it is relatively easy to just make everything bigger to match.
Majestic, bunny-eared dragon.
Now you too can make jewelry, and a dragon to hoard it. Or maybe combine everything, and make bejeweled chainmail armor with dragon wings. Yes, perfect.
About Brandon Quist
Brandon is originally from Olmsted Falls, Ohio. He has studied both at Baldwin Wallace college and Brigham Young University, and is currently pursuing Chemical Engineering, among other things. He considers himself a jack of all trades, and a master of none. In his spare time, Brandon enjoys knitting, guitar, reading, origami, writing, and photography.
