How to Wire Wrap a Flower Using the BeadSmith Wooden Mandrel Set

SKU VID-1706
Designer: Alexandra Smith
In this video, you will see how to create a wire wrapped flower design using the BeadSmith 6-Piece Wooden Mandrel Set for Wire Forming. First you will see how to use the 3/8 inch mandrel to wire wrap a flower with 26 gauge artistic craft wire. Then you will see how to attach two flowers by wire wrapping them together at the center. The video offers additional jewelry design ideas for use with the BeadSmith wooden mandrel set.
Audio Transcript
Note: This audio transcript is auto-generated and may not be completely accurate.
hi this is Alexandra at beadaholique - oh you how to wire wrap of flour using the beadsmith wooden mandrel set so here's a necklace that I made using the technique that I'm going to show you and this has two different sizes of flowers wire wrapped together I'll also show you that technique as well so you can see that I've come up with some various sizes of the flowers using some different gauges and colors of wire just to show you how versatile this technique is using this mandrel set which ranges in size and it's very handy how its labeled up here for other tools we'll be using some flush cutters and some chain nose pliers so to begin let me bring in my ruler and we're going to go ahead and make a size 3/8 inch flower and I'm going to cut and a foot of wire 26 gauge wire to begin there we go for this thinner gauge wire I find a foot works really well you know if you're doing larger sizes probably a foot and a half is what you're going to want to use so here's the process we're gonna take about an inch of wire as a tail and I'm pinching that down onto my mandrel using my thumb next I'm going to coil the wire around the mandrel six times and I'm choosing six as my chosen number of petals I find that it works to use five to eight depending on the style that you're looking for so let me count one two three four five and that should be six so I've got my wire coiled and I'm gonna pull it off of the mandrel and next I'm gonna take and just kind of pinch those coils together and with one tail of my wire I'm going coil around the center of all of my loops and I'm just gonna come around once and barely twice and I'm gonna clip the wire right as it comes around and tuck that tail in with my pliers then I'm going to take my other tail and do the same thing in the opposite direction coiling around just once and barely twice and clipping tucking that tail negev end ended up with five loops let's see what I've got here what I'm gonna do is take the end most loop on one side and pull it out and then I'm going to find the end most loop on the other side indeed I do have five loops but I still want to demonstrate because it all works the same way so I'm bringing my loops around to fashion them so that they're about equally spaced and you'll see what I have here it looks a bit like an atom with electrons rotating around it like so now I'm gonna take my flat chain nose pliers and I'm gripping toward the inside of one of these petals and I'm rotating the petal clockwise and flattening it out to the side then I'm going to move over to the next petal up and curve that one in the same fashion by gripping from behind my previous petal and curving it out to the side and little by little I'm coming around and just bending those petals to flatten them out headed in the same direction worth one here curving around and my fifth petal you'll see it created a flattened flower now what I can do is just squeeze gently on the center to really flatten those out further and it's that simple so what you've got is a little wire wrapped core in the middle with rotating petals emanating outward and the next thing I want to show you is how to combine them so this uses 22 gauge wire for the larger size 26 for the smaller and I'm going to overlay them onto each other and you can see what that does is it's kind of forgiving so even though my shapes aren't perfect once I overlay the flowers they've really come together nicely so actually how to scrap a wire here that's gonna be perfect it's about 4 inches which is a little more than I'll need and I'm gonna curve that into a bit of a hook like so and I'm gonna hook that wire through the center of my little flower so that it catches in that middle wrapped core portion and then I'm going to overlay my other larger flower in the same way so that the two wires come in between the petals and I'll be able to lock the two by coiling the wires through that central core area and again it doesn't need to be perfect because the way that the wires overlay each other you really don't see the wire work so much you kind of see the bigger picture so I'm just pulling those wires taut and I'm going to continue working the wire through and around to lock those together and once I feel like I have enough coils that it's nice and secure I will clip and tuck them and the way they fit together it's it's sort of like a cage so it really works well to just tuck them in where they won't snag on anything so I'm clipping and tucking my wire into the center and of the wirework better final squeeze and there I have my little overlaid petals and you can adjust them as you as you see fit so that's the general idea and this is also kind of neat to play with the idea of mixing metals for instance you could put white on Rose or gold on silver there's lots of different ways to work with this so I was really excited to come up with that design I also wanted to make mention that this dowel set is great for use in creating raft wire frames as well so these two larger sizes would be great for this sort of technique which we also have a video for on how to create a wrapped wire frame so I hope you enjoyed this video and this is the technique that was used to create this beautiful necklace here all of these tools and supplies are available at beadaholique.com and please also subscribe to our YouTube channel for all the latest updates thanks for watching

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