Made of 10 awg copper wire and 18 awg silver plated wire. Copper work hardened more than I thought, wish I went with 12g instead, but it does make the final result sturdier.
Made of 10 awg copper wire and 18 awg silver plated wire. Copper work hardened more than I thought, wish I went with 12g instead, but it does make the final result sturdier.
Just wrapping, no heat, though the more you bend the copper, the harder it gets, so you want to be careful to bend it as little as possible while you go.
So, you take three set of copper wire ~4ft, bend them in half into U shapes, then do two sets of braids with each 'side' of each U. So you should be able to see the left and right 'halves' of the bracelet are just a 'normal' braids of the three wires.
You also just take a ~4ft section of the smaller wire, and after doing each 'loop' of the big braid, you tightly wrap the part of each side that are now touching. So all of the silver wire is a single long strand. You should be able to barely see in the picture where the silver wire jumps from each of the coils to the next on the backside.
It sounds complicated, but like braiding, it is pretty intuitive once you figure out how to start, and the hard part is keeping it the same consistency the whole way so it doesn't look uneven.
Here's another pic, where you can see how I clipped and carfully used pliers to tuck the ends in. Gotta be careful with pliers on jewelry wire, scratches real easily. I got teflon tipped ones for fine work, but they can't handle bending 10g wire.
That's really cool, is there a tool or anything you're using, pliers/tweezer style things? Doesn't seem easy to manipulate into that kind of pattern at all.
Mostly my hands. You want to avoid using most pliers actually; they'll knick and scratch the metal. I do have teflon pliers, but they actually broke trying to bend the 10g copper :/ (though I think I fixed em woth glue).
I did still need to use some pliers to get some stubborn parts into place, and to like, fold the ends under, and then did my best to delicately file off the scuffs, but its still imperfect.
That sounds paaaaainful for your hands. It's pretty though!