Make jewellery from sheet and wire wax

You’re a complete beginner and are looking for an easy entrance into the world of wax carving. Or you have experience carving hard wax and are looking for something new. Learning to make jewellery from sheet and wire wax is a perfect way to learn new skills, whether you’re a beginner or have experience with other types of wax! You learn all about shaping the soft sheet and wire wax and how to experiment.

So, what are some of the skills you learn in this class?

Shaping

Sheet and wire are both soft waxes. This means you can easily move and bend them into the shape you want. Because of that you don’t need a lot of tools!

Scissors are enough to cut sheet into the shape you want.

I do recommend getting a pair just for this. The wax is sticky and you don’t want to ruin a pair of good scissors with the sticky residue. And while you’re getting a pair, also look at the kids decorative edge scissors! Easy way to add a fun border around your pieces.

Because the wax is sticky, it really clogs your files. And because the wax is soft, you can easily distort the shape of your piece if you use too much force while filing. The best alternative to a file is your fingernails!

Your nails are strong enough to smooth edges and remove unevenness, and soft enough to not damage your piece!

Texturing

One of the best things about the softness of sheet wax is that you can easily texture it. Have a look around your studio and your home. I’m sure you can find something with a texture!

Besides found textures, you can also use texturing tools used for polymer clay.

Texturing tools for card making.

And laser etched texture paper.

You can learn all about texturing sheet wax in this class.

Experimentation

Sheet and wire are both very intuitive waxes. When you have it in your hands and feel how it moves, you just KNOW the things you want to try out. You know if you want to try sharp folds or flowing curves, organic shapes or geometric forms. So try out what your intuition is telling you to do!

Take one sheet of wax and cut it into pieces.

Then try out something different with each piece. Start with the things you want to try out, but also try things you’re not sure about.

You might surprise yourself and find something that you like the look of!

You’re not making finished pieces here. You’re finding out what the sheet is capable of doing, finding out what you like to do. And once you know that you can make your actual pieces that way!

Wire patterns

I don’t know about you, but when I see any kind of wire my first instinct is to braid it. Braiding is actually a good place to start with wax wire. You quickly learn how hard you can pull wire so it doesn’t break. How tight you can get the wires together without them breaking. How much you can bend and rebend wire before it breaks.

You braid and break wires until you can braid without breaking wires. And once you can work with wire without it breaking, you can actually start making pieces with it!

There are many more patterns you can create with wire besides braiding and you can try them out here.

Versatility

Simple shapes can be a very versatile building block to make loads of different bigger shapes and pieces. Cut out a lot of the same shape, start arranging them in different configurations, and see what you can come up with! To make it easier we’re sticking with flower shapes in this class.

More or less petals, bend the flower inwards or outwards, fold each petal length wise or width wise. Every change you make gives you a completely different looking flower shape.

You end up with loads of different pieces with a minimal amount of changes. The possibilities are endless! See how many different shapes you can come up with.

In short

You learn how to experiment and how to turn those experiments into actual pieces.

Feel inspired to learn all this? You can buy the sheet and wire class now!