Link to Free Jewelry Project Confetti Collar for Beadalon

Confetti Collar Copyright 2007 Margot Potter for Beadalon

One of my design specialties is exposed wire work. I use soft wire to create woven designs that utilize tension to suspend the beads on the wire. They’re architectural and dimensional and doing them with soft wire creates a unique set of problems to solve. I started exploring this when we had our retail shop ten years ago. In typical Impatient Beader™ path of least resistance fashion I was looking for a way to get the appearance of an illusion necklace without having to knot, crimp or glue the beads in place. I discovered that by weaving wire in and out of beads you’d get the same suspended look without the futziness of the other techniques. Since then I’ve done countless designs like these ever exploring the idea of tension and suspension.

Beadalon began buying my pieces almost ten years ago when one of their employees Yvette Rodriguez discovered them in our shop window. They’ve used them for catalogs, packages, ads and newsletters and eventually I became a Design Team Member. My challenge in that role is to constantly devise new techniques and innovations to showcase their materials. We have a really great trio of designers at Beadalon and I’m honored to be among them.



Over the past two years I’ve been playing with the soft wire circle. I’ve created a lot of variations on this theme, still seeking the perfect expression of this idea. The design above was featured on the cover of the Beadalon catalogue two years ago. I’ve been waiting for the instructions to go live so I could share them with you. If you follow this link, you can get the step by step instructions for this Confetti Collar. It’s a very simple concept, mostly a matter of repetition of pattern and variation of size. It does require some patience to create, because it takes a lot of time to make that many circles! Once you start making these wire circles, you’ll want to make more, they’re very addicting. I have a simple wire bracelet in Bead and Wire Jewelry Exposed that uses a variation on this technique.

I find this work really challenging and exciting. It’s easy to keep doing the same old thing again and again, or to use techniques that already exist, but creating new techniques is far more exciting to me. Keep looking out for more of these ideas here over the next few weeks.

Until next time...craft on with your bad selves.

xoxo,
Madge