It's always a thrill getting a new book in the mail, and never more so than when the book is your own! Seeing my name on the cover of the newly redesigned Wire Art Jewelry Workshop (Interweave Press) is an honor, and I never take for granted how lucky I am to have found such a terrific publisher.After self-publishing my book Wire Art Jewelry through "Create Space" (affiliated with amazon.com), I found that my readers were very disappointed in the b&w pages and the poor quality paper. The cover looked great and the projects are lots of fun, but it's hard to tell how beautiful everything is when the presentation is in black and white. So a few months ago I took my book out of circulation and sold it to Interweave Press.Now you can see it's been beautifully rephotographed and redesigned with a smashing new layout that's very easy to read.I love the "Wrap a Rock" pendant project; the rock pictured looks heavy but it's actually quite lightweight. I picked it up on a rocky beach on the island of Santorini when I was teaching a workshop there in October 2008. I took the rock home, and later made a wire wrap for it so that I could wear it on my favorite sterling silver ball-chain necklace.Here's the cover piece: Dancing Man Pendant. This necklace would be extremely expensive to make now! Tons of silver wire, plus turquoise and Peruvian opal, and big chunky Thai-silver shell beads. Given the price of silver today, I would suggest making something similar using copper wire instead!This project is one of my favorites: Triangle-Drop earrings. I used to teach them all the time, and my students always came out with some terrific variations of their own.
This photo shows a series of step-by-step photos that I took for the book; Interweave Press has reproduced them in full color, quite large. I was surprised that my original text, which came out to 200 pages, was faithfully redone in the newly designed book at 160 pages without the loss of a single technique or project.
AND, Wire Art Jewelry Workshop comes packaged with a one-hour DVD! The contents include an introduction, and then techniques: jump rings, jump-ring rosettes, figure-8 links, freeform knotless netting, twisting fine-gauge wire, worm beads (featured on the cover), and double-coil wrapped beads.The retail price is $26.95, but you can pre-order it on amazon.com for $17.79 by clicking here.Happy wrapping,Sharilyn
