How To Choose The Right Wire For Jewelry Making

Hi there, in this video I am going to talk to you about choosing the right wire for your jewelry making project. There's lots of different metals, sizes and types out there. I will give you some tips to help you to choose what's perfect for what you want to accomplish.

You have decided you want to make some wire jewelry or use wire in your jewelry making, and you go to purchase some and what you find is a dizzying array of wires to choose from, and you ask what type of wire should I use for my project. Sorry but the best answer I can give you is it depends. It depends on what it is that you are trying to accomplish.

The first thing that you need to know when you are buying wire for jewelry is the concept of gauge. And gauge simply means the thickness around the wire is. Now here I have some very fine, almost threadlike wire and this is 30 gauge. And here I have some very heavy, obviously much, much thicker diameter wire, and this is 12 gauge. So one thing that you need to know when you go to purchase your wire is that the higher the number, the finer the wire. And you can buy a wire heavier than this, you can buy eight gauge, six, it gets really thick and chunky. But as you can see, it depends on what it is you are trying to do. I use this 12 gauge wire to make hammered bangle bracelets and it works out wonderfully. This is very, very fine wire. It's great for wire wrapping designs. You could make a frame of sorts out of heavier gauge wire, and then use this very fine wire to wrap and coil and add beads onto heavier wire. Of course, this wouldn't do structurally.

Somewhere in between these two extremes, we have 20 gauge wire which is a pretty common wire to use for lots of different projects. If you wanted to make your own ear wires, for example, 20 gauge is good. It's not too thick that it would hurt going into the ear, and it's not so thin that it wouldn't hold the shape.

Now as far as other things about wire, there's different colors and different metals that it can be made out of. These three here that I have are all copper wire. There's no coatings or anything on them and I like that because I like to get a tarnish on a patina on my wire pieces so that it's dark in the crevices, highlighting the detail and then I can polish up the high points. So you have to make sure when you are purchasing it that somewhere it says bare copper wire. Often it's coated with an anti-tarnish coating and if you want a patina, you'll be disappointed.

And then there are these just inexpensive craft store wires they're often copper cores with a colored aluminium outer part, and the thing that you have to be careful about that if you are going to be doing a lot of manipulating. Sometimes, the colored core will show through, but these are inexpensive and good to practice wire working with.

These ones that I have are sterling silver filled, which is a thicker coating than plating but it's sterling silver. So I am still going to get that tarnish effect with the patina, and again, often your craft store wires they are going to have a very, very thin sterling silver plating if any or they're just going to be a base metal of some kind of aluminium and copper combination, but they are pretty, and so again it depends on what it is that you want to do with it.

And then there's this stuff. This is aluminium wire, it's actually in the floral section and this is very, very soft stuff, and this really, you can, I am sure you can find uses for it in jewelry. This is mostly used in wrapping floral arrangements. I use it to make armatures for sculptures, but I really wouldn't use it for jewelry making. So the type of material, the final look that you want to get, whether it's structural or not. Those are the factors that will make a difference when you're choosing wire for your project.