I know, I know I missed a week of blogging, but I have a good reason. To make up for missing a week of blogging I’ll post two blogs this week.  

Now here’s my reason for missing. At the end of June we taught a wonderful class in Columbus Ohio at 1 Stop Bead Shop. It was great. Kim and I always love going to classes. Here’s how the weekend went. 

On Friday we taught a wirewrap class. In the morning we made the ring project from chapter 14 of my wirewrap book Wirewrapping: The Basics and Beyond. The Pearl Ring is a simple way to create an elegant ring. Everyone in the class did so well on the project and that made it a joy to teach.  

In the afternoon we made a matching bracelet that would complement the pearl ring. This was a new project that was developed especially for this class. The Queen of Sheba Bracelet design is now available on our website at http://www.macjewels.com/tutorials.html.  

Here’s how one students projects turned out-

On Saturday we taught a basic wiresmithing class. Everyone had a great time exploring this new technique.  

In the morning we went over all of the basics of wiresmithing; the simple tools, the materials, the frame stacking technique and how to cut and wrap the bundle. Once everyone had a basic understanding of the techniques we jumped right into the first project – The Basic Wiresmithed Pendant. Everyone in the class picked up the basics really well. All of their pendants worked out great, I was really impressed. 

Now that the basics were understood we moved on to something a little more complicated - The Wiresmithed Cuff Bracelet. Believe it or not this piece is just as simple to create as the pendant. It’s made using the same simple wiresmithed techniques that were used to create the pendant. It really shows how easy and fun wiresmithing can be. 

Here are a few pictures of the wiresmith class.

Pendant and Cuff Bracelet

There’s a reason that everyone picked up all of these techniques so easily. We have found that many of the bead shops around the U.S. do a great job teaching their customers more than just beading techniques. 1 Stop Bead Shop (Columbus Ohio), Bead Culture (Jackson Michigan), JuJu Beads (Findlay Ohio) and all of the other shops that we have had the privilege of teaching at do a wonderful job of expanding peoples knowledge of jewelry techniques. I think that’s important. You should never be satisfied with a narrow scope of design techniques. Everyone should spend some time and learn something new. You never know, that new technique that you learn could help you create some beautiful pieces of art. 

No trip to Columbus would be complete without a trip to the Columbus Zoo. We had a ball checking out the animals. It gave us some time to cut loose from working. Here’s how crazy it got –

The Columbus Zoo will never be the same...sorry Columbus 

‘til next time, 

Jim McIntosh