Thanks to all of you who have responded to my posts. I am so grateful
and hope that I can give back more when I am more experienced. I am
writing today about bezels that can be done with wire and do not need
soldering.
Does anyone have advice about how to make a braided bezel for a
stone? I would like one that I can use for pendants and earrings of
all shapes. I already know how to make wire-wrapped bezels, but I
would be grateful for advice about how I can make one that has a
braided look that really grips the pendants well. I would prefer one
that did not include the need to solder.
While I usually do solder the ends together when I tie a bezel for a
stone, there are times when I don’t have to. The important thing to
keep in mind is that the bezel has to maintain its integrity around
the stone, so merely bringing a strip of braid around its perimeter
is not going to provide much security.
I make the kinds of bezels you refer to above, from as small as 6mm
up to any size desired, but it isn’t a trivial thing to do. The knot
that I use is the Turk’s Head, which you can learn to do very easily
from a number of books (I recommend the “Ashley Book of Knots”, but
there are many) and it’s just a matter of producing it in wire at the
size desired.
I teach people to make them as finger rings, but it’s just as easy
to measure the circumference of a stone as it is to measure a finger.
My website has enough on it that at least a few people
have learned to do them on their own, without taking my workshop,
just from looking at it.