To crochet or to wrap.....

Yesterday's little experiment in wrapping made me go hunt out my old vessels sketchbook and samples. I wanted to revisit my ideas with these new techniques in mind and see how I viewed them now. Well, the first thing I thought was - OMG! I can't show you this!! The finish on this green sample is terrible!! Seems like all that small jewellery wrapping has given me a finer eye for the finishing than I had before. And I thought I was being fussy then:) Compared to the wrapped wire, this crochet version looks a lot heavier by comparison. But it's all good. It means I'm making progress! Also the wire ends bent over were just a temporary solution till I found a better way of finishing the wire. Now, I have several solutions I can try. What difference a year makes.

It was very interesting though as my design ideas are still just what I want to achieve, so it was just the techniques that were holding me back from producing them. It will be a good starting place for new work and hopefully I can develop and refine them with less practical limitations in the structure now.

sketchbook design from last year.

It is amazing how similar this sketchbook drawing is to the ideas I'm making now - even to the wrapping detail. The little shield design was for a large wall piece I wanted to make then, but I'm thinking it would look lovely as a piece of jewellery now - with some simplification, I think!!

You can also see with these earlier samples that the dyed yarn has only subtle colour variations. I liked this fact at the time but now I've seen the smaller colour runs in my new yarns, I've changed my mind. Although the subtle details in the greeny/blues are lovely close-up, from a distance they look a solid 'green', not much distinction at all.  I'll have to play some more with colour before I get the balance completely right I think. But it's getting closer:)

I do like the crochet stitch ridged detail down one side, especially around the spiralled ends but it does seem to get a bit messy when it joins another strand. The yarn wrapping avoids that problem entirely. So is the crochet slip stitch wrapping necessary or will just yarn wrapping by hand be a better solution and give a cleaner finish?

I think I will try a small experiment and reproduce a section of this design using the new yarns and wrapping instead of the crochet. It will be interesting to compare and contrast the results. That will certainly be a two or three day project at least so I'll post my progress as I go. I'm sure a few new jewellery techniques will be tried out as well. I keep finding new inspiring images and techniques I'd love to try and I like having little projects on the go as well as bigger ones too. I'm also expecting a little order of beads sometime soon so that is bound to distract me somewhat :)

Well, it's been an interesting day looking through my sketchbook and seeing what ideas I had then. It's obvious I hadn't managed to push the design side a lot so I'm eager to get past the practicalities now and onto exploring the new ideas!

Off to catch a good nights sleep now to be all fresh for tomorrow, so thank you for accompanying me today on the creative journey. See you all soon!