Custom earwires - cool finishing touches

I've been searching and searching for cool earwire components to use in my jewellery designs, but nothing I'm seeing at the supplies outlets really grabs me. From time to time, I've seen exquisite earrings (usually from European designers) with fab earwire components, but where are those exotic findings being sourced? It's literally driving me insane. Then I had an epiphany... why not start making my own handcrafted, unique wires.

With a few trials, I came up with this idea. It's a sterling silver hand knotted earwire supporting yummy aqua apatite faceted onions and a tiny sky blue topaz. The sterling silver wire (22 gauge) was wrapped tightly to form this knot. The final product was oxidized (I use liver of sulphur) and then I like to polish the relief for effect.

Shown below is another style of the knotted earwire. That's summery lemon chalcedony with apatite. Now these are 2 very fun and flirty examples of the hand knotted earwire in application, but the same styles will work well on my luxe earrings.

Last week for example, I gave birth to the Earth and Sky Chandeliers - an ornately wire wrapped luxe earring with over 45 carats of gorgeous gemstones. For that design, I was truly in need of an appropriate sterling earwire. I settled for a stock bali sterling silver french hook that isn't totally in keeping with the feel of this piece.

Anyhow I am pleased with how the Earth and Sky Chandeliers turned out. They're currently listed on my flagship shoppe called http://www.gahooletree.etsy.com/ and this creation has caught the attention of enough readers that I was featured on Talent Database the other day as an emerging designer! Whoopee!!!

I'm enjoying the opportunity to showcase my work online. These blogs, online shoppes and websites are a wonderful record of my work, my online portfolio as it were. And it's becoming an important part of my creative process to document my accomplishments and progress in this regard.

The coolest part of this earwire development process is that I can now expand upon this base and create more styles. And perhaps this 'need' to develop high end findings will force me to get out the torch.

But before I get to that I suppose I need to reorganize my workspace and create a true soldering and metalworking bench area. And before I do that, I absolutely must clean up my studio. Things here have gotten way too crowded and disorganized :)