Now that the loop is completed you’re actually going to do some wirewrapping! You’ll need your two chain nose flat pliers for this, one for each hand. (Incidently, I took these pictures by myself… which is pretty crazy because I had to hold the camera and wirewrap with two hands at the same time. Wait, that’s 3 hands…!)
In any case, take one of the chain nose pliers and grasp the loop as shown in Figure 4a. I grasp it not at the very tip of the plier, but quite a ways up (almost in the middle) because I find this allows to exert less pressure on the loop. You want to be especially careful here, because it is quite easy to grab it too hard and mark up the wire while wrapping. Some people use rubber tipped or “dipped” pliers, but I find I can get away with not as long as the headpin material is not too soft. Note that depending on whether the end of your headpin is “on top” or “on bottom” of the loop, you will be wrapping away from you or toward you.
You’ll see what I mean here… next take the other set of chain nose pliers in your other hand and grasp the end of the headpin. Now start wrapping the wire carefully around the section of headpin. Depending on how much “distance” is between the loop and the stone, you will be able to get around 2 to 4 turns of the wire.
The number of turns you can get depends on the thickness of the wire and the amount of distance along the headpin that was left back in Figure 2b-c when bending the wire down by 90 degrees. You need to play around with the amount of this distance in order to get the number of turns you want. I like 3 turns on average if I can get that, but some people like as many as 6 or as few as 2. I wouldn’t recommend less than 2.
You want to also make sure that you don’t wrap on top of previous wraps when you’re doing this, you want them to line up really nice and snugly close to each other; touching but not overlapping, and definitely without “space” between them. Wrap until you get fairly close to the stone, but not too close. This can be important, especially if you are wirewrapping something like crystal because if you are not careful the end of the wirewrap can crack the crystal! I’ve done this many times on accident.
So, when you are done wrapping, take your sharp nosed cutting pliers and clip off the headpin end fairly close to the wrap. Sometimes, you might not have to cut anything off if the headpin was just the right length.
