So the next window is something quite different. I wanted to wait until I had the wire jig for the more complicated shapes, so I tackled the middle one in the meantime.
What the not-very-good-drawing doesn’t actually show is that where the strands cross, they are knots. Obviously not something one could easily do with a thick wire, so I worked with a 0.5mm wire and started figuring things out with brass wire (cheaper than silver).
Once having figured how the knot was going to work (and that I could get it to be roughly the right size), I had to figure out how to make the net.
The tricky parts were in making the knots all look the same (there is a right and a left) and in positioning them the same distance apart. And then to make it look like the drawing, I needed two nets, offset against each other. Another thing I discovered was that the knots tended to wriggle and slip about a little bit. A solution was that once the knot was in the right place, a couple of taps with the jewellers hammer flattened the wire/knots and they stayed put. All this took quite a bit of working out and trial and error.
Once I had figured it out in the brass, I went on to the silver. The delicate nature of the 0.5mm wire doesn’t leave all that much room for mistakes. As you will see in the bottom right, one of the wires snapped when I had had to undo the knot and re-do it because it was back-to-front compared to the others. At this stage I had been working on it for a number of hours and realised that I was making more and more mistakes, probably because I was tired. I decided to stop for the night.
Lesson: Even if not sleepy-tired, my eyes, hands and brain do get tired and multiple mistakes are a sign that it might be time for a break.
I thought the brass and silver combination looked really pretty (and I may well use it another time) but the two-colour combination wasn’t true to the original window grills. At this point I decided that all these little windows should be silver only. I realised this will mean that I have to re-do the first one, but that’s probably not a bad thing (don’t tell anyone, but it is actually slightly too tall and too thin to meet the 6 x 6 cm anyway).
The next opportunity to get into the studio led to much better results and the knots came together much easier.
I also discovered that my bench block is 6 x 6cm (handy). I haven’t trimmed the edges of the nets yet, but it did get me to thinking about how I was going to frame the windows…. A couple of cardboard edges give more of a sense of what will be included.
