Sparkly wire crown for meeee!

With all the British monarchy in the news lately, I’d been seeing a great deal of crowns and tiaras. When I was a wee tot I wanted the sparkliest, gaudiest crown ever, something like this:

Luckily, as I have gotten older, my tastes have become more refined. And over time, I forgot about my childhood lust for royal headwear. But then the Royal Wedding happened, and the fire in my belly was ignited again. I don’t work in metal so I couldn’t weld anything, so I decided to go with wirework. I bought a bunch of wirework magazines and books and looked through them for ideas. I decided I didn’t want the wire to be gold or silver, but a darker, more muted bronze-brown color. It made the objects near it really pop out. And then I went with clear AB crystals, both in bicone and round. Normally I avoid AB crystals. AB is short for Aurora Borealis, which is this rainbow coating on one half of the crystal bead. I was going to go with plain clear crystal, but the ABs had a bit more life to them. Once I had all the ingredients, I hunkered down and started to work. And pretty much immediately there was a big pile of failure. Working with wire is HARD. It’s squishy and soft, or it’s hard and difficult to bend, and it has a tiny bit of elasticity, so it is damn near impossible to make everything match perfectly (which is how I wanted it). However, after accumulating a pile of spent wire, I finally kind of got the hang of it, and this past weekend, I finished the crown. I must say, it turned out really well. Here’s a picture of it on my dining room table only lit by sunshine from my window.

And here it is lit at night lit by my dining room lights.

And the best part about it is that it has dangles, so it sparkles with almost no motion. Here’s an animated gif to give you an idea.

I couldn’t, for the life of me, get a picture showing the sheer twinklitude of this piece, but take my word for it, it is Twinkle City. Oh yeah.

Leave a Reply