Crystal Flower, Free Wire Jewelry Tutorial

This tutorial is a tribute to the Handmade Wire Jewelry and Craft Community and strictly NOT FOR SALE. Instructions are for personal use only. Any attempt on reuse of this document’s text, pictures or any resources without the author's authorization is strictly prohibited.

You CAN teach the technique to others once you learn the technique; you CAN NOT use text nor pictures from this tutorial as teaching material to teach others. 

You CAN produce this Crystal Flower once you learned the techniques; you CAN NOT reproduce the EXACT Crystal Flower for sale, but you can make them as gift to your friends and family – you get the idea. You CAN create your own Crystal Flower with your own designs/colors/materials, by applying the techniques introduced in this tutorial for sale, but yourself must make it instead of your employees.

 

Tools:

1.     Flush cutter

2.     Chain nose pliers

3.     Eurotool EuroPunch 1.25mm Round Hole Punch Pliers for Sheet Metal

4.     Marker pen

5.     Ruler

6.     Silver Polishing Cloth Shine Rite 8 X 5 Inches (1 Cloth)  7.   Filing tool

Materials for ONE Crystal Flower:

1.     1 X 26ga Stamping Sterling Silver 10.8mm Scallop Blank

2.     1 X 4mmSwarovski Chaton Montees

3.     2 X 6” of 30ga silver wires (note: you will have 4” of wastage for each wires, but 6” works best for me, you may cut a shorter wires but I would suggest not shorter than 4” each so that there’s room for your fingers to work.)

4.     One small piece of card

5.     Optional: 3m Micropore Surgical Tape 1/2" x 10 Yards with Dispenser  

Slide Show:

   

Tools and Materials:

Tools and Materials needed for this project.

Step 1: Punching holes on Sterling Silver Blanks

Draw two squares on to the blank. This is to help to determine where to punch the holes.  

The sheet metal puncher will probably leave a mark on your blanks so to avoid that, use a small piece (5mm X 5mm) of card to do the trick.

Get ready to punch through the card.

Punch through the card firmly.  

Leave the card on the puncher.

Position the tip of the puncher at the crossed point of two straight lines.

Punch through the Silver Stamping Blank firmly.

Overview of the sterling silver blank with a punched hole.

The small piece of card will fall off the puncher and this can complicate stuff so to make things easier, I use 3m Micropore Surgical Tape (1/2") to stay put the card, why 3M? Because I find that other tapes will leave some sticky leftover on my pliers and I don’t want that, I don’t have that issue with 3M’s product.

 Get ready to punch the rest of holes. 

Overview: Punch holes on the rest of crossed straight lines, you will have total of 8 holes on this metal blank. Don’t throw away those silver dust, collect and keep them, you may be able to trade it in for new silver if you accumulated lots of them. Step 2: Filing and Polising Sterling Silver Blanks

File the punched area to make them smooth, make sure they doesn’t cut/ catches the skins.

 All filed and smoothen.

Polish your silver stamping blanks to remove those lines. I use Shine Rite Silver Polish Polishing Cloth (8 X 5 Inches) to restore it’s shines before moving on to the next step. Step 3: Attaching Swarovski Chaton Montees onto the Sterling Silver Stamping Blanks

Get ready of your 4mm Swarovski Chaton Montees.

Pick up your 6” of 30ga wires, fold half, and thread it through the Chaton Montees as shown in the picture.

Hold the right wires with your non-dominant’s index and middle finger, bring the left wires go on top of the right wires, threat it through the holes via the exit of the right wires, and then bring the wires out via the initial exit of the left wires.

 Close up view.

Gently pull the left wires out and minimize the loop.  

Repeat the same process for the other set of holes.

  Overview: wires in tack now.

Orient the Chaton Montees as shown in the picture, we are going to work on those holes without threaded wires. Bring the left wires of to go on top of right wires, bring the wires back out through the same initial exit hole.

 

Overview: Rotate the Chaton Montees to have the un-threaded wires on top.

  Repeat the process of threading the wires.

  Now all holes have exiting wires, and 4 small loops. 

Place the Chaton Montees right at the center of the Silver Stamping Blank, thread all wires to the back of the Silver Stamping Blank via alternate hole.

Now we are going to attach the Chaton Montees onto the Silver Stamping Blanks. You may start at any Chaton Montees you want. Bring the wires to the front via the next hole on the right.  

Pull the wires out completely.

Thread the wires through the Chaton Montees’ hole as shown in the picture.   Tips: Point the wires-end upwards when threading it out from the hole while pressing the rest of wires down, otherwise threading the wires out could be quite challenging.

Gently pull the wires out.

The green circle area is where the previous step ends; red circle is where we are going to work on now.    NOTE: Always work diagonally to increase the chance of having the Chaton Montees to sit right at the center of the Silver Stamping Blanks.

  Chaton Montees is now attached onto the Silver Stamping Blanks.

 Side view.  

Now we have 4 sets of loops attaching the Chaton Montees, we are going to use all the wires to coil 3 times on the right wires of it’s left loop; you may start from any wires you want. To coil, bring the wires underneath the right wires of the left loop.

Coil 3 times.

IMPORTANT: When coiling, the wires on the left might get pulled out, making the loop bigger than it needs to be, so please remember to fix this by pulling the exiting wires of the hole before proceeding to the next coiling process.

 Go around to repeat the process, remember to pull the exiting wires before coiling onto the wires.

Trim away the excess wires with your flush cutter, or, waggle the wires to break (Here’s the video on how to break the wires naturally:

   

Project Completed. All yours now, go and make something beautiful and have fun! :)




Corra @ de Cor's Handmades