keep moving

These are prototypes and I honestly meant to make a few more like them but for some reason I can't find the Graphite Shimmer beads I had in the original order, so I'm waiting on another shipment to arrive before I can make any flag climbers with gray or brown in them.

( Pride climbers: six-color rainbow, nonbinary, bi, and trans. )

Not my best photographic work, but I don't have a model, and I don't have a tripod, so you get me trying to hold the camera still and photograph my own ears.

I've been meaning to work these up for a while, ever since I realized that Swarovski and Preciosa made very small crystal beads in colors super close to the various colors used on pride flags. My most popular items on Etsy have been ear climbers, and most of them have been either emerald green crystal cup chain, ruby red crystal cup chain, or pride flag designs. Especially in niobium, at least for the pride ones. These are made with bronze-anodized niobium main wire, 22 gauge, and bare 28 gauge niobium wrapping wire. Hypoallergenic to the entire human species, unless you have a skin sensitivity to glass and/or the AB or shimmer coatings on some of the beads. I used three millimeter bicones; I can do up to about six, maybe seven, beads on a climber using four millimeter ones, but after that it starts getting uncomfortably long when I test them on my own ear, and the extra width is just enough of a difference to make putting on headphones or holding a phone to my ear awkward. I might see if a trans flag would work with four millimeter crystals. It'd probably look right lengthwise.

I'd originally meant to do ace pride, which is the primary reason why I ordered Graphite Shimmer, but like I said... I can't find the package. Either it didn't ship or I lost it somehow. Well, I have more coming. Also smokey topaz beads so I can do the black-brown-inclusive eight color flag, and I have two or three alternate purple options on the way, since the Purple Velvet color is rather nice but hard to distinguish from the Jet if you're wearing the climber against skin that's got anything resembling proper melanin.

I'll figure out how one goes about listing things as 'I will make these to order' on Etsy, work up one of each flag in the bronze-anodized niobium, and see who's interested in which ones.

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This Saturday October 12th crowmarkcreations will be in the store for an ear climber class! ✨ The class is $30 which includes an hour long class and materials. Sign up online or in the store. ✨ #earclimbers #jewelry #jewelrymaking #beading #beads #beadshop #localbeadshop #bostonbeadshop #beadandfiber #bostonbeading

A post shared by BEAD + FIBER (beadandfiber) on Oct 7, 2019 at 9:10am PDT

... now let's see if that worked or not. If it didn't, my bad, long story short I'm teaching an ear climber-making class on Saturday at my local bead and fiber store, ping me for details.

I posted these off today:

( Only one picture but I feel bad about hitting people's reading pages with images without warning. )

I spent some time yesterday doing Etsy photography of my various ear climber designs so far. They'll be listed later today, but I wanted to brag about the ones that actually sold.

It is not so much that I am on an ear climber kick as that they work up quickly and are the only design I have sold to complete strangers on Etsy more than once so far. Also it's kind of nice to have the general look of multiple piercings without having to defer the ability to give blood once again (I'm good to make the attempt come Dec. 5-6 or so).
( So anyway here's the latest ones. )

I cut the back wire a little shorter on these this time to see how much difference it made. It still holds in place as well as it did with the long wire, but I find it a little more awkward to put them in with a shorter wire, so I'll probably go back to the long for Etsy sale models. The difference is maybe an eighth of an inch, so I'm not too fussed either way.

Or at least get a better pic of that pendant... anyway, I have two pieces to show off today. I'll put the other one up later. For now, here, an experiment in ear climbers. Ear crawlers. Whatever, there's like five names for the damn things.

( They are like unto earrings, but they go through the hole and a long piece of metal goes up the back of your ear, and another goes over the front of your ear, and they hold to your lobe as if you had multiple piercings, but you DON'T, *gasp* *amaze* )

Herkimer diamonds- double-pointed high clarity quartz crystals, which legally aren't supposed to be called Herkimer diamonds unless they were mined in Herkimer County, NY, but I don't know how much that rule gets obeyed- 28 gauge silver-filled wire, and 21 gauge Argentium silver wire. For reference, Argentium silver is also called Argentium sterling. It's basically sterling silver, but instead of copper, they use the same percentage of germanium, producing a form of silver that experiences little to no tarnish.

Note to self, 26 gauge silver wire (I think it's sterling rather than argentium sterling fwiw) is a lot stiffer and more of a pain in the ass to work with than 28 gauge. Especially when you're trying to wrap it around 21 or 22 gauge wire. Who knew fractions of a millimeter would make that much difference?

( Images behind cut. )