Completed Works to Date

The ones I have pictures of, anyway...

This is a very small sampling of the work I have done over the years. Much of my work was given as gifts before I had a digital camera, and thus I have almost no pictures of my early work. I guess that's a good thing, since I've improved a lot over the four or so years I've been doing this. Also, I have a tendency to give work away without thinking of getting a picture beforehand, and so much of my more recent work is also not shown here. And I have to apologize for the quality of the pictures. My digital camera wasn't really designed for close-up work; it has no setting for close-ups, and its optimal focus range is 9 feet. A couple of the pictures were actually scanned and so they look much better, but most of them are awful.
-Alyssa

Onyx cabochon wrapped in 20ga half hard sterling silver wire.

Black enameled copper wire with blue glass beads.

Segmented byzantine chain in 20ga 3.5mm ID brass rings, with 18ga 6mm ID fine silver accent rings.

20ga 2mm ID fine silver rings. This is the smallest ring size I have yet worked with, and I really like how it turned out.

I saw a hemp necklace that was strung and knotted in a pattern similar to this, and I just had to make something like it. I came out fairly well, though it's a little too big for me. I have a very small neck.

20ga half hard sterling silver wire with onyx cabochons and malachite cabochon in sterling silver setting. At the time I did this piece, it was my first foray into sterling silver wire. I remember being so scared that I'd mess it up and waste perfectly good wire.

18 ga black enameled copper wire and onyx cabochons. I made this one on a whim to go with my outfit when my parents took my brother and I out to see a show in San Francisco, but it's one of my favorites now.

Braided strands of purple seed beads with amethyst beads and sterling silver and amethyst cabochon pendant. This was a present for my boyfriend's grandmother.

18ga "natural" enameled copper (enameled with a clear coat so that it doesn't tarnish to dark brown) rings with green seed beads and green glass drop beads. I'm not sure of the inner diameter of the rings on this one, but I think they're about 3/16".

Hematite beads and 20ga half hard sterling silver wire. I get by far the most comments on this piece, but that may be because it's one of my favorites and I wear it the most.

20ga nickel plated copper rings in standard european four-in-one chainmail pattern (although the pattern "flips over" in the center of the front of the necklace for symmetry.

Enameled copper wire in "silver" with aventurine and hexagonal blue agate beads. This was another present for my boyfriend's grandmother.

20ga nickel plated copper rings in a segmented byzantine pattern with Swarovski crystals. This was my first attempt at the byzantine pattern. I keep meaning to redo it in actual silver.

Blue agate beads for the body, moss agate beads for the wings. This became a present for a friend of mine, but luckily I thought of taking a picture first. Later, I made a necklace with a similarly styled butterfly, using the same moss agate beads for the wings, which became a birthday present for a friend of mine.

This was my second or third attempt at a butterfly. I decided to leave off the tail this time because that makes it look more like a dragonfly. This one is moss agate and some stone I don't know off the top of my head. The center is a silver bead that's hollow with a webbing pattern to it, so that it's full of holes. I actually put the wires holding the wings directly through the center silver bead, and it turned out fairly well, though the wings have a tendency to flop a little bit now and then. They're easy to put back.

18ga 3/16" fine silver rings, in a "snake chain" pattern, otherwise known as persian four-in-one. This was a gift for one of my neighbors (though I changed the clasp to a lobster claw because he had problems with the simple hook not staying closed), and so far he's worn it so much that the silver plating on the clasp has worn off. I need to get him a replacement clasp that won't do that, as the undermetal of the first replacement is an ugly black.

I think this is my favorite piece so far, but it's a bit too nice for everyday wear. And just to brag, I coiled and cut every single silver ring in the chain of this necklace myself. Anyway, it's 20ga half hard sterling silver wire, with some 22ga half hard sterling silver to hold the beads. The beads are garnet, and the chain is standard rope chain. I don't usually make copies of my work because I like them to be original, but at the request of my friends I've made a few replicas of this one with store bought chain, and they love them (or at least that's what they tell me).

The classic names I've heard for this type of bracelet are "slave bracelet" and "hand flower." The center loop is meant to go around the middle finger like a ring (and many slave bracelets simply include a ring), while the other chains wrap around other parts of the hand, such that the main design sits across the back of the hand. I can't claim responsibility for constructing the sterling silver chains on this one, but the rest is my work. Black anodized aluminum in 18ga 3/16" and 20ga 3/32", as well as 18ga 3/16" sterling silver rings and a few 20ga 3/32" rings in sterling.

This was actually one of the first necklaces I made for myself. I wire-wrapped the quartz crystal drop myself, originally in nickel silver, but it got really tarnished over time, so I redid it in 20ga half-hard sterling silver. Have I mentioned I love 20 ga HH sterling silver? Anyway, the two beads nearest the drop are smokey quartz and the other round beads are amethyst of varying sizes. The rest is just seed beads and tube beads colored to look kinda like hematite. I really like this one, and it's one of the few I actually wear. And I swear the two smokey quartz are the same color, the camera did funny things to the color of the stones.

A friend of mine bought me a gorgeous red velvet shirt that's cut really low, and I had absolutely nothing to go with it, but I really wanted to wear it for Valentine's day. So I got out my garnet, some silver enameled copper, and some Swarovski crystals I had left over from another project, and there you have it. It's very long on me, but it's perfect for the shirt, or anything low cut, really. I'm amazed at how well the black velvet backdrop brought out the color of the garnet. I was afraid the camera glare would drown it out.

So helm's chain is typically a straight chain like byzantine (though it looks completely different as you might guess). But I recently saw a few people experimenting with making helm's chain into a sheet by lying two chains side by side and connecting. Well I've always liked the look of the oriental 6-in-1 pattern and its variants, and I noticed that the chain actually looped back on itself as a hexagon quite nicely, so I connected it up, added some rings in the middle, and really liked what I got. At some point I should redo it with rings that have been cut better, because the copper shows under the enamel at all the ring joints in this one. Anyway, stats: 18ga black enameled copper. The large rings are 6.5mm ID and the small rings are 4mm ID. It's currently strung as a pendant on a choker length black satin cord, and I really like it that way.

Half persian 3-in-1 chain surrounds each 10mm carnelian cabochon, in sterling silver. There are sterling silver connecting rings as well as a few enameled copper accent rings. I was mainly doing this piece to build up a small amount of stock so that I could start showing pieces off and selling them. It has a little over one full ounce of sterling silver in it (which is a ton of silver, and worth about $20 on its own), and it took 2-3 hours to complete. I listed it for $80, and it sold on March 4th, 2007.

The entire bracelet is sterling silver, in 20ga 1/8" rings. The main band is inverted round chain, and there are segments of normal round interspered with inverted to give it an almost byzantine look, except in threes rather than twos.

I specifically ordered the rings to make celtic stars with after a friend of mine made the most stunning piece I had ever seen using celtic stars and helm's chain. I did my best not to rip her off completely, and she doesn't seem to mind being the inspiration for this piece. It's all 18ga in 1/4" and 5/16" as well as other sizes, some black anodized aluminum and some sterling silver. There is one black drop bead hanging from the center chain. And just to brag a little, I made sure that the center silver dangling chain will always be centered. It actually slips through the center ring of the outer black chain loop so that it's locked in place. I thought it was quite ingeneous. It took well over two hours to complete, and there's quite a bit of silver in there. But this piece is mine. I like it too much to part with it, though not too much not to make copies if I get a commission.

I made a piece for my mom with wrapped cabochons, and while I was making it, I got the idea for this. Three black onyx cabochons wrapped in half persian 3-in-1 sterling silver (20ga 1/8" rings in case you care), with some silver chain I bought and black anodized aluminum helm's chain, using the same size rings as in the Celtic stars in the previous piece. It's actually quite comfortable, and amazingly enough it doesn't get in my way when I'm doing things. I've washed dishes with this on, taken midterms, and worked on chainmaille, and it's never bothered me.

I've done quite a few dice bags like this one now, with various inlays. This is probably the second most involved inlay I've managed so far, though I don't have pictures of the others. This one was done in black anodized aluminum and bright aluminum, 18ga 3/32" ID. It ties with a black leather cord. A bag of this size, with a fairly intricate inlay takes me around 6 hours to complete.

This was actually one of the first chainmail pieces I did. My brother juggles, and had heard about wrapping juggling balls in chainmail. So we went and picked out some lightweight squishy center bits (Harry Potter golden snitches turned out to be the best for size and weight, actually, though we cut the wings off), and I coiled a bunch of rings and set to work. Later, I found out that the juggling balls he'd heard about were done with normal juggling balls inside and very large (up to 3/4" ID) rings, which would be why my brother insisted these could be made in an hour or less. The entire set of three took me somewhere around 25 hours to complete, though of course not all in one sitting, and that includes the time to coil and cut all those rings. In the future, I'll just buy them.

This is currently the most recent of my work. I'm attempting to complete the set of 5 juggling balls that I promised my brother way back when. This particular ball has 798 rings in it, and only took about 6-7 hours, including all the coiling and cutting, so I'm getting marginally faster. One more to go!

This is a solid sheet of stainless steel and brass elfweave, in 18ga 3/16" rings. Most of the weave is stainless steel, but there are stripes of brass through it, which are there not only for decoration, but because it was literally impossible to get the last stainless steel rings into the pattern along that line (which is the last row of rings to get put in the piece each time you add a new segment). But the brass, which has an inner diamter that's just barely larger than the steel but still technically 3/16" and is softer, fits in there just fine. The finished piece, intended to be a bracer, is about 8" by 5" (at my best guess), and took me well over 8 hours to finish because this weave is so amazingly busy. I think you can see what I mean. This may well be the largest project I've done to date, and it's most certainly the most rings in anyone project. But hey, my boyfriend seemed to appreciate it.

I recently received a commission for a wallet chain from a friend of mine. I brought him a few sample weaves and he really liked "barrel weave", which I had never attempted before making that sample. But he expressed concerns about the strength of the weave, because the original design has single connectors in some places. Anyway, I set about trying to find a similar pattern that was sturdier, came up empty handed in my search (at least for patterns that would work with the rings I had on hand), and ended up fiddling with barrel weave until I found a way to get double connectors everywhere without making the weave far too rigid to be a wallet chain. So, this is the result.