Metallic Misadventures {Complete with Photographic Evidence}

It's no secret that I've been suffering from a very serious addiction. It's an addiction that involves wire and pliers and lots and lots of time.

Mmmhm, I'm addicted to wire wrapping.

I'm really not very good at it yet, but it's just SO FUN! Anyway, I was searching for a new project to take on, and also anticipating Zhenya's return from her European adventures...and so it seemed natural to connect the two and make some dreadlock ornaments. 

Do you know that the internet is pretty much devoid of all instruction in the dreadlock ornament-making department? I'm not sure who has the corner on the dread ornament market, but whoever it is, they're not sharing their secrets.

But I decided 'it can't be that hard...right?' So I looked at a few pictures to get an idea of what I wanted to do, grabbed my weapons of choice, and went to work.

It was a bit harder than I'd expected. To start with, I was using a thicker gauge wire than the one I'm used to working with. I wanted the ornaments to hold their shape...which I'm sure they'll do.

Since I don't have any dreads of my own, I just took a guess at how big the ornaments should be, and ended up using a highlighter pen as the base around which to wrap my wire. I also made them easily adjustable, which is a good thing, because they turned out on the big side. I had some trouble getting nice, uniform spirals, and eventually abandoned that effort. I decided that a certain amount of lopsidedness would make them look more...primitive...or something.

Anyway, on the whole and taking all things into consideration, I think they turned out fairly satisfactorily. I asked Zhenya to give me a user report and let me know if there are any design flaws that should be rectified before I launch into my dread ornament-making business (ha! Ha)!