Stone sweaters and other curiosities

In my last video tutorial, I demonstrated how to make a wire sweater using Viking wire knitting to capture a circular cabochon. I suggested a round cabochon as it is the easiest shape to try when first starting out.

But it isn't the only thing you can capture in Viking wire knitting!

I had a phase early in my wire knitting career where I tried to capture a variety of objects in wire knitting; such as small glass bottles, sea shells, beach rocks, stone eggs, pieces of antler, beach glass...all sorts of things.

So today I'm sharing one of my favorite pieces, and one that I made for myself. It's a quartz cluster I found on the south side hills in St John's over 20 years ago. I finally made it into pendant in 2016. It was very rough on the back so I covered the back densely with knitting to protect my clothes and brought the edges up past the crystal points.

It occurred to me that some of you might enjoy seeing those earlier exploits, so I dug through The Purple Raven Boutique (my former business) archives to see what pictures I might still have. These are from circa 2012-14 (forgive the photo quality - I was so green then).  And the knitting was pretty much free form.

And even later on I'd still want to try something different.  This is a raku pottery sea shell made by  Northeastern Folk Art (a Newfoundland pottery business) that I decided to turn into a wearable piece.

The key is you need some sort of frame or apparatus to anchor your first stitches.  After that,  you can increase or decrease stitches as needed to encase the object as desired.

If you are interested in seeing a video about this, message me at theknittedraven@gmail.com 

To find the recent tutorial on setting a cabochon with Viking style wire knitting, click HERE