My Memory Wire Has Amnesia

After the traumatic experience of losing all except one of my precious jump rings on the floor (which a lovely reader referred to, very aptly, as "the black hole"), I thought I'd try my hand at a memory wire bracelet.

How I imagined my new bracelet would look

Memory wire is so called because it remembers its original shape, and will always revert to that shape.  You can purchase memory wire for rings, bracelets and necklaces, generally in coils but sometimes as a complete piece with a clasp already attached. 

You can imagine, to a novice artist, that this has a lot of appeal - hell, most of it's done and I only have to get a really lovely combination of beads and bits on the wire to end up with a beautiful piece of jewellery.  So I bought my memory wire bracelets (multicoloured wire, just because I could, and it seemed more artistic somehow than plain old grey), and a pleasing variety of beads.

So not only did a memory wire bracelet sound like a relatively simple project, it also seemed like one of the smarter pieces of jewellery that you can buy. Best of all though, I felt like the possibility of it following the jump rings into who-knows-where was fairly remote.

I started off full of enthusiasm.  It didn't last long.

These lovely little bracelets have a connector (trust me when I tell you that connectors will be featuring in a future blog!) that screws one side of the bracelet to the other - obviously so you can get the bracelet on and off without dislocating your thumb.  Suppliers think of everything really.  Under the side of the screw connector, with the hole for the screw, is a crimp bead (fairly self explanatory - it gets crimped onto the end of the wire to prevent everything sliding off when the bracelet is undone), and the other has the screw piece sticking out.  "Screw piece" would be one of those technical jewellery terms I use now I'm an artist.

So I uncrimped the bead (that only took an hour or so - I think Hercules had crimped it) and prepared to thread my gorgeous beads on, in an artistically pleasing way.

Hmmm, forgot to suss out the hole size in the beads versus the diameter of the memory wire - they're both the same.  Rookie mistake, it could happen to anyone!  Luckily enough of the beads had a minutely larger hole and I managed to slide them on (i.e. push, shove, beg and plead until they moved).  As luck would have it, because I completely forgot to set it out and measure it first, the pattern of beads I'd chosen fitted exactly (I can only think that whoever watches over us must have taken pity on me).

As you might imagine, by this stage I was feeling fairly pleased with myself, even if I had sore arm muscles from the pushing and shoving - and the bracelet was looking great too.  Just had to pop the crimp bead and connector end back on and a new bracelet would be looking for a loving new home.

These things should have come with instructions!  No one mentioned that the connector should be on before the crimp bead.  And no, it didn't occur to me to look how the stupid thing went together as I pulled it apart - it was a simple connector with a simple crimp bead.  Why is it called memory wire if it can't remember how it goes together?

By the time I'd managed to pull the whole thing apart again and start over the end of the wire was sort of daggy and needed to be chopped off. And no, it didn't enter my head that if I chopped off a couple of millimetres of daggy end that my lovely pattern of beads wouldn't fit anymore and would be completely lopsided and wrong.

How my new bracelet really looks!

And no, I didn't think about how hard that crimp bead would be to get off a second time, when I put it on anyway, because I thought it wouldn't be noticeable that the pattern was lopsided and wrong.

The positive side to all of this was that I discovered my artistic temperament and invented a new swear word. I tried the new word out on the memory wire, while I was trying to work out what to do, but it didn't seem all that impressed (there's a distinct possibility it had heard it before).  I guess I just chalk it up to experience and start with a new bracelet.

And that's as far as I've made it.  The new bracelet is apparently a smidge thicker and I can't get the beads on it!  Lucky I like shopping - I need to buy new beads.

But as I write this, I can feel the lopsided and wrong bracelet looking at me from the bench - sort of like it remembers something unpleasant and might just get it into its little memory wire head to come alive, find an axe and visit me in the middle of the night.

I'm thinking elastic may be the perfect medium for me next.