Making mock-ups

A while back, a friend whose passion is public relations and marketing approached me about making some jewelry pieces for a couple of events she’s a part of as a means of raising awareness of my little operation. This weekend, I actually had a chance to sit down and start making some of the designs I’ve been carrying around in my head.

The pieces I’m making are just mock-ups, just to check the design and to see how my friend likes them for her events. It’s been fun, though. As with anything I’m doing, I’ve taken these mock-ups very seriously, trying to make each piece as well as i would any piece that was going somewhere.

There is something to be said for sitting here with the wire and the beads and whims that flutter through my head at the speed of light. I started with the designs I had originally been planning for one event, and then slowly started playing off those designs to start making the pieces for the other event.

I’m still working, but it’s really been a great release to just sit down and allow these ideas to form and come out, unhindered by thoughts of whether or not anyone will like them, making them just because I can.

The inspiration of a rote activity

I’ve been feeling more crafty lately, and with some projects requested by a friend who wants to see me launched, I’ve been spending some time hunched over my wire jig creating hundreds of the wire components I use most frequently in my designs currently (plus one I developed while churning these pieces out).

It’s great fun. I sit in front of the TV with my wire jig, a bag of pegs, and spools of wire and just wrap. It’s rather a relaxing past time, I’ve discovered. I like to see how many of a component I can make within a certain time period, or I’ll show my friends what I’m working on.

An unexpected side effect of this relaxing wrapping is the random designing that goes on in my head while I’m working. For example, I completed a piece last weekend that had been haunting me for days before. The focal components are best described by one of my coworkers as looking like a safety pin. Everyone loves the design.

The problem is, however, that it has a lot of wire at the point where it is supposed to be joined with a chain or French wires, which makes it very hard to attach and hang correctly. In fact, I’m still wrestling with making them hang correctly on their finished pieces. The solution, I’ve discovered, is to reduce the amount of wire at that point is to make the “safety pin” look more like a paper clip.

I haven’t tried it yet, but I may be looking into it during the next week.