Maybe I've been too hard on myself...

So, tonight Dusk and I went to the Arlington County Fair... it was cute, and we had a lot of fun with the rides and the games and the funnel cake.  Dusk won a fox plushie and I won him a penguin plushie, and I took him for his first ride on a Ferris Wheel... very romantic. :)  But part of the event had a lot of craft vendors, and I was looking at the jewelry vendors there.  And frankly, a lot of them were just crap.  I'm used to dealing at Rock & Gem shows, where the dealers are rockhounds generally much older than myself and having been honing their jewelry making skills for years.  That wasn't what I saw here.  Most of it was very generic, stuff that could have been bought out of any catalog pre-made.  The one wire-wrapper in the place was wrapping large irregularly-shaped colored glass bead "cabochons" with what appeared to be silver craft wire.  She was charging between 8 and 16 bucks for such pendants.  The curves, while fairly nicely executed (no obvious tool marks) were fairly generic and unimaginative... the same wire curves were essentially repeated without variation on each piece.  While there is nothing necessary "wrong" with any of this so long as the customers are happy with it, it does bring home the fact that I may have been much too hard on myself with regard to my own wire-wrapping.  Using just craft wire and the cabochons I have, I could easily make salable necklaces.  The higher quality wire would, IMO, vastly increase the quality and desirability of my work, but I could easily start putting together a salable inventory with what I have on hand.  I may even be able to sell a lot of the brass and copper jewelry that I've been planning as "practice" with the new wire.

Another One

This is the product of this evening's practice. Still using craft wire till my shipment comes in. Went with the copper tonight, since at least that hides the tool marks better.