tiaras | The Feather Forge

So I have a table in the Arisia art show, and not enough work to fill it. I’ve made some progress towards that in recent weeks; the previous post showed a couple of necklaces in the Spring Rites series, which will be in the show.

Anyway, this week, my office was closed for the holidays, so I’ve made some more things! Pendants, even. And another (slightly different) version of my original Spring Rites necklace.

The tiara is entirely new this week.

Wire-wrapped pendants. The pinkish-grey oval is imperial jasper. No clue about the other stones!

The wire on the pendants is all stainless steel, but I am feeling like I am finally ready to see how the sterling silver I have on hand goes.

I’m also not wild about the jasper pendant. It’s a nice enough stone that it really doesn’t need any special treatment or accent. Also I hate that with the addition of the leaf on the bottom, it’s just a long piece. Maybe I should bend the leaf up so it wraps around the bottom; I don’t know.

I think one of my biggest problems going forward is going to be naming things. I have a HUGE list of names for Spring Rites items, and selecting from that is going to be its own painful process. Coming up with names for random pendants, though, beyond “Stone Pendant 24,” argh.

And yes, it has crossed my mind to just go find a random name generator and use that! Random drow elf names, random Martian names, whatever.

So a couple of weeks ago, during Building the Asylum, I walked in on the end of a conversation between a couple of people – I caught the words “diva” and “need a tiara!” and had to ask one of the participants who it was who needed a tiara, her or him.

At that point, I was merely amused.

She said she needed one.

Then part of my brain had a flash of inspiration, and so I asked, “Really? Because I could make you one,” and decided to interpret her response (uncontrolled laughter) as approval and encouragement, while simultaneously trying to work out how to actually make it. It seemed like it shouldn’t be that much different than wire necklaces, right?

Eventually I did get some actual words, to the effect that sparkly pink was Right Out, but stainless steel and black were good ideas (we have Internets in the space; I pointed her to some photos on the blog).

So I did some sketches at StrowlerCon, and took a couple of hours a week later to put it all together. I am always surprised by how long it takes to wind wire around other wire; the main structure took about an hour, but all the fiddly bits to finish it up took almost as much time!

A final sketch - on paper towels, because I forgot to bring trace paper - with some beads laid on top of it to see how those might look.

Completed tiara, formed by bending stainless steel wire and wiring glass and lava beads to it.

The completed tiara. The large bead is lava; the small ones are glass.

I used 20 ga stainless steel for the main structure, and 22 ga stainless for the windings around the structure, and to attach the big bead. The 22 ga was too heavy to attach the small beads, so I ended up using some 24? 26? ga tinned copper to attach those. Note to self: Order some smaller gauge stainless!

Closeup image of parts of the tiara, focusing on the small gauge wire and beads.

I really like how the thin wire, repeated enough, becomes an additional decorative element, background to the beads and general overall form. It keeps surprising me when that happens.

Success!

Conclusion: really not that much different from the necklaces, though forming the base into the right shape was a lot trickier.

The Feather Forge

Category Archives: tiaras

Progress towards Arisia

A tiara is just an upside-down necklace