I recently helped out as a sort of studio assistant at one of Sara Sally Lagrand's corsage workshops. Because there were only 4 torches at the venue, people came over a three day period to do the first part of the workshop, and then we all gathered together to assemble the stuff on the fourth day.

Theoretically, I was supposed to help out anyone having troubles with wire, since I do have some experience with it. Practically, I visited with a lot of my friends in my guild, and watched the experienced teachers among them (at least three fellow guild members are former teachers in the arts at either the high school or college level) do any actual tutoring.

It was a pleasure to watch.

7x7x3 cm. The glass beads were from my junk/bead curtain box, and could have been completed any time in, oh, the last decade or so. I made the bracelet, using ‘junk’ and florist's paddle wire, 15jan12. Photographed 17jan12.

Sara Sally Lagrand uses a somewhat different technique to make her bracelets, which if I recall correctly, include a clasp and sterling bead caps, and which I'm not gonna detail here—take the class, it's a good one and a lot of fun.^[1] Sara uses something she calls pirate stitch, which is basically a three-dimensional variation of the more complex lacing method used by french beaded flower makers.

Lagrand prefers to loop to the inside, prioritizing the overall sculptural shape of the tube, but I wanted emphasize the ridges of the support wires, so I looped to the outside. Folks, there's a reason why she does it the other way: it's difficult to get the wrapping wire properly tight. I fixed this problem, firstly by decoratively kinking the wires, which looked cool, and then by trying lace or weave some additional wire through them (that black stuff) which most assuredly did not.

Anyhoo. She also prefers to cut off pieces of the 24ga to keep it from work hardening, but as I'm lazy and hate dealing with ends, and knew from doing the french beaded flowers, who^[2] always work from the spool, that this was unnecessary.

I did, however, have to pre-string my beads, so I lost some design flexibility that way. Once I got the beads on, boredom really started to set in, and I reverted to sort of wrapping I did on the turquoise bracelet I featured the other day which, um, also looks pretty ugly.

However, I had a good time, and while I'd still like to do the more elaborate, needlelace based techniques in a bracelet, this has some potential.

Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.