The Lunar at Night

One of my best friends ever visited me at the end of March. I've written about Jeremy before in another post, and he remains one of the only friends from my university days whom I actually -see- on a semi-regular basis. All right, so two years isn't really semi-regular, but given I haven't seen my entire batch of crazy US friends since 2003 - well, you get the picture.

In between juggling work and catching up, I sat through several RPG gaming sessions with Jer and the Bloke, and one day I actually brought along some wire to fiddle around with while we played. Not having a very clear idea beyond 'pendant', I free-formed it and wrapped away with a cheerful optimism that should have been an advanced warning.

Well. The pendant took about a week to complete because like a typical dimwitted ninny, I miscalculated the curvature of the two frames I was wiring together and it turned out lopsided. The result was an imbalanced piece of nicely wired crap which bugged the daylights out of me because it wouldn't hang straight. This lopsidedness got even worse when I wrapped the -heavier- half of it with silver beads (yes, very smart I know. What was I thinking --oh wait. I wasn't.) In the end, I had to add some silver beads to the other side of the frame to compensate - but even then it wasn't quite enough to offset the weight disparity. Finally, I ended up hanging a focal bead and a curved silver piece from the centre loop and that more or less did the trick.

Moral of the story: Calculate your frame right to begin with, and you won't wind up with a design headache like I did. Just saying.

Because I'd used anodised steel wire and silver beads for the pendant frame, I wanted to call it something Dark and Gothic and Night-like. When I put in the blue focal pearl, I thought it looked rather like a hanging moon - so in honour of the game, the character I was playing and the fact that I'd worked on it while gaming, the piece got christened Lunar.


Lunar: Anodised 18ga and 24ga steel, pewter beads, 20ga artistic wire, blue cultured pearl.


See how the frame gets lopsided? Yep, kids, don't try this at home. It makes you crazy. It still doesn't hang straight enough for me despite the fixes.


I thought I could get away with not wrapping the top loops but they looked too bulky and uncouth so they got covered up.

I'll consider this a prototype and see if I can't refine it any further. Anodized steel wire is a joy to work with; I should really give it a bit more attention.

And next time, I -measure- both frames and secure them -properly- before I start wrapping away like a crazed cat for cream.