It didn’t go so well. I started with green floral wire, probably about 28 gauge, maybe 26, which was stiff with its coating. Second round was 30 gauge gold wire. Both were with a size 1 steel hook (2.75mm). My tension was all over the place – with the gold wire especially, it was impossible to get a grip on it without bending it and risking kinks. Not that I didn’t get kinks regardless. After the fact it occurred to me that finger cots on two or three fingers of my left hand might be a help, but by then I was getting ready for bed.

I did feel like I was starting to get the hang of it, as uneven as that second round is, but by then I was kind of over the whole granny square idea and decided to make a chained chain. I used the same hook, and red wire that was unlabeled, but probably 28-30 gauge. That went better, especially because the unevenness of my loops is not as apparent as the uneven height of the double crochet stitches.

Speaking of kinks, as we were a while ago, I tried to reel the wire straight off the spool instead of letting it come off the end, coiled, because I read a hint somewhere that I’d get fewer kinks that way. I didn’t have much luck getting the gold wire to unreel like that, but the red wire was better behaved. I think it did result in fewer kinks, but not their complete elimination.

I thought about trying beaded wire crochet, but it was getting late and I didn’t have any ideas that appealed to me much. Instead, in honor of how birds-nest-y my wire crochet is (especially the granny), I made a wrapped wire bird’s nest.

Frigid rain all day yesterday. I do like winter, but not that aspect.

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I decided to finish the necklace after all this time to discover that not only did I not remember how to make the wrapped loops, I didn’t remember what the technique was even called. I tried a few practice loops and they really didn’t come out. Fortunately for me, its name is straightforward. I found wonderful instructions on Fusion Beads, from a whole index of wire beading techniques. I had been doing it almost right, with two exceptions: I hadn’t been leaving a long enough “tail” of wire to wrap with, and I had missed the movement of the pliers from under the loop to inside it (step 3 in the instructions linked above). Not long after reading those instructions, I had this:

I made up the hook and eye closure since I didn’t have any copper-colored findings. My motivation to start was really just to check it off the list, but I rather like it. I’ll put it with the rest of my underused necklaces!

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One particular hardware store employee helped me brainstorm and find pieces for my Pez dispensers, so I made him a gift to take to him when I bring in pictures of the finished dispensers.

Don’t ask. I don’t have an answer.

I experimented with crochet shaping on Friday. The first one didn’t turn out remotely like I planned/hoped, but, well, here’s a potato monster in a tree.

Of course he doesn’t actually live in a tree; that would be silly. He lives in a basket.

That’s all for now!

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Here are the decapitated dispensers. I made some spares in case I needed them. The original heads were football helmets and characters from the movie Cars.

And here are the recapitated dispensers!

He is a computer engineer and loves photography, to the point that he started a side business photographing weddings and other events. He love to bike and do other (nonmotorized) racing sports. He and his wife have a boat that they use as often as possible in the summer, which I tried but failed to replicate in clay. I could have drawn from his hobby of woodworking or the fact that he’s a great cook, but those both seemed harder to capture in Pez head form.

All of the dispensers do still work, although I realized on his birthday – two days after shipping – that I completely forgot to include the candy in the package.

Here are some more angles. From the top you can see the tread I cut into the tire, and to my surprise, the vent lines I cut into the computer monitor. From the side/back you can see that the computer is a Macintosh, with the power button on the right near the back.

Best of all, he loved them. Happy birthday, big bruvver!

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The first step of the project, which cannot be revealed right now because it would give the whole thing away, happened way back in the late summer or early fall. I was waiting for the next steps until I’d finished my SF embroidery, figuring it would be better to concentrate on one thing at a time. I did, however, get out a lot of materials the last weekend of stitching.

I wanted to do four figures, but apparently I have no idea what a boat looks like. I tried several times, looking at pictures in between, and still, no. It’s a shoe! It’s a bicycle seat! It’s an arrowhead! So, there were three, two in clay + mirror and one in clay + wire.

The wire one was maybe going to be a piece of a commercial toy, but I couldn’t find anything that looked like what I wanted: a bicycle tire. So I wound some wire around a small rod and around part of a large funnel, and then used smaller wire to make spokes between them. That was a pain.

The ones with mirrors were a computer and a camera. The camera, in fact, ended up with two mirrors: one for the lens and one for the viewscreen on the back. The computer had a mirror for the monitor screen. These were surprisingly unpainful to make. Here’s a picture of the three figures after baking:

I didn’t have any black clay so I painted the camera and tire after baking them. Fortunately you can still see the tread on the tire, sliced in with a utility knife. The vent slots on the computer monitor, however, disappeared when I painted that figure with pearly white paint. Oh well! I used a bent wire to clean the paint off the mirrors after it dried – the bottom of the U.

The bicycle tire is set up to actually spin, though I can’t show you that picture until the big reveal. This entailed some time at the hardware store looking at all the options (fortunately one of the guys who works there was very enthusiastic about this project and helped produce ideas), but worked out pretty well and with minimal cutting and bending of wire.

Until Monday!

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