Art Charms & Swaps

I don't know how I got to it, but I located an Art Charm group on Yahoo. I've been busy joining & making art charms, & learning some wire work techniques.

These are from the Feather Your Nest swap. I love the little birdhouse beads which I happened to see & purchased before the swap was even announced. They were just meant to be in this swap!The bird's nest is handmade my be from wire, & found the sweetest most perfect pearls for the eggs.

I used a wire jig for the component holding the birdhouse bead.

I'll do a quick wire jig comparison. I purchased a wire jig called a Thing-a-ma-Jig. It was frustratingly badly designed. It's all metal. The pegs are too small for the holes in the jig, so the manufacturer included little plastic things that slipped on the backside of the peg when it was in the hole. That kept the peg from falling out, but it was still so wiggly in the hole it made my loops uneven.

It's much easier to add a peg as you need it instead of putting all the pegs into the jig at once. With this jig, I had to insert the peg, then turn it over & wrestle the plastic piece onto the peg bottom, turn it over, bend the wire, turn it over & place the plastic piece... You can see how slow a process it was. I could've put all the pegs in at once, but that makes winding the wire around the pegs very difficult. Anyway, it was just a huge inconvenience & really made the process slow & interrupted. The resulting components were never exactly even either.

Soooooo, I hunted down a better quality jig - I found the Wig Jig online. What a difference in the quality of the jig & the wire components that I made on it. There's the red one holding the little birdhouse bead. This jig is made from the type of plastic used in airplane construction - heavy duty stuff. The pegs are all metal, & they fit snuggly into the holes - no wobbling, no falling out. Just set the peg, wrap the wire, set another peg, wrap the wire. Wohooooooo! That was so much easier, smoother & faster a process. Every bend was perfect!

Here's where you can purchase the perfectly designed jig - plus you have choices of several different types of jigs - just scroll down. PLUS there are all kinds of tutorials on the site!
Wig Jigs

I'm not a salesperson for the makers of Wig Jig, but I'm definitely convinced it's the best jig available.