Adventures with Fishing Lures

Today's adventure  involved making a necklace with holographic lure bodies, a swing blade, and a little colorado blade.   For this project I used Wrap-It 20 gauge nickel silver wire, wire cutters, rounded nose pliers, needle nose pliers, a steel block, a hammer, and of course, fishing lures. 

I twisted some initial pieces of wire:

I hammered the pieces on the steel block to harden and flatten them a little.  Then I linked the curvy wire pieces to the fishing lures with jump rings that I also made from the Wrap-It wire. 

My first design looked good laid out, but didn't hang well when I tested it around my neck:

 

The second modified design worked better:

The necklace hung nicely and I decided to add a few more embellishments.  I was pleased with the finished piece.

Making Your Own Chain

So yesterday I was hanging out at the mall.  Those of you who know me will know how unusual this actually is.  I was in a store and I was admiring their wire worked jewelry (especially the chain they had used) when I realized that it looked like the chain was just wire as well.  I looked closely and decided I would go home and try it.

Turns out, all you need to make a pretty cool chain is some wire, some sort of wire cutters, and rounded nose pliers.  You make a couple of loops, and then make a "U" shape.  Your first piece should look something like this:

I made the links as I went along.  You make the chain by hooking the pieces together by sliding the "U" shaped link part through the double circle loop of another link, and then close the link by squeezing the "U" shaped tail into the double circle.  Make sense?

Here's a picture of some of the completed chain.  Not bad, eh, for a first try?  It was pretty easy.  I think that a beginning skill level could do it, although it would probably take more time.

And the finished piece!

Stay tuned for more adventures.  I'm going to be trying some more new things, including glass bead making, and Art Clay (which is the coolest thing that I never knew existed!).

Ideas

I have several ideas for books.  I think it's inevitable that I'm just going to have to be a very successful author/writer when I grow up.

Right now I'm working on finishing a mermaid novel.  My first novel was a vampire novel, which unfortunately was published right when all the popular vampire teen books were getting published.  I say unfortunately because now it seems like I was just being a lemming and copying the crowd, doing the "popular" thing.  I would rather write about what I want to read about, but vampires are kind of tainted for me since they are now all the rage.  I'm pretty pleased with my progress on this second full length novel.  I'm at about 63,000 words.

I used to write all the time for fun when I was younger.  The stories always kind of just tapered off and never really had endings.  I'm not so sure they ever had plots either.  I just loved stories and reading and scenes.  There are so many possibilities in books.  I would write stories on lined notebook paper until I graduated to a magnificent dinosaur of a computer, a Zenith, that was older than I was and came complete with the literally floppy floppy disks.  I was in heaven.  The computer was so old no one else wanted to use it for much.  It was my portal into a world with caves filled with diamonds, worlds where fairies walked on water, and other realms always existed behind every waterfall.  It was a portal to worlds of mermaids and science fiction stories about the future.  I wrote about electronic libraries years before the Kindle became a reality, but I didn't envision the internet and being able to store hundreds of books on one book sized machine.  In my science fiction novel of the future I had a wall that was a computer screen, and what looked like books on a shelved.  After you suctioned a wire to the back of your skull (like the matrix, but gentler) and thought about what you wanted to read, the information would fly off the virtual shelf to fill up the screen.  I'm rambling a little.  But the point was that my stories sometimes had plots, but never had endings.  I'm really excited about this novel I'm working on because it has a plot, and an ending.  The ending is actually the most important, pivotal part of the book rather than just being a necessary severance of a story because it has to end somewhere.

I think after my mermaid novel I'm going to try my hand at non-fiction for a bit of a change.  Maybe I'll do some fiction simultaneously.  I don't know which story to work on next.  I read somewhere that if there is something you want to read but it hasn't been written yet, it's up to you to write it.  There are so many things I want to read that haven't been written.