ON THE SUBJECT OF HEAD PINS
Posted on October 31 2017
Up until recent years, silver and gold head pins were generally mass produced with a little flat "disk" at the end, Fine for some designs, but I loved the look of a real little silver ball at the bottom of my earrings.
In the 1980s when Andrew Romanoff and I were producing a Swarovski Crystal jewelry line (which eventually went into 300 national accounts) I wanted head pins with tiny round ends, more elegant, so Andrew found a way to mass produce them,
inventing a long handled wire cutter that he screwed down onto a table. The wire was fed through the blade and into a bin. Then came the real test. The heads on the pins were made individually, passing the tip of the wire through a flame to ball it and then tumbling the pins in great wooden drums to shine them up and harden the ends which had been softened by the annealing process.
When I settled down in Bisbee in 1993, I decided to manufacture head pins for the general and growing bead jewelry making public. It was quite a job and I understood why I had never come across any handmade headpins on the commercial market until then. As a matter of fact, as time goes on I am becoming more and more sure that Andrew and I were the first to tackle the job commercially. Girlfriends between jobs would sit for hours in my studio cutting silver wire and then doing this repetitive work. I marketed several lengths and gauges. The most popular were the 18 gauge four inch half hard head pins for making pendants. They were a blessing to the new bead makers and sold well. At some point a couple of other bead makers picked up the idea and decided to go into the same business. So I gave up making the head pins for others and moved on. I had demonstrated the simple procedure on one of my instructional videos and made life easier for the ever increasing number of people who were discovering beads and bead jewelry making.
Imagine buying headpins for jewelry and not having the freedom to experiment in bead earring making and pendant design because each head pin cost too much. It gave newbies much more control of their creative process when they discovered that in making their own headpins, each one cost little more than the price of the wire. Galleries it turned out, appreciated earrings made with the tiny shining silver ball at the bottom...
Great! More control over essential supplies is bliss. Making head pins is rather tedious work , but personally I loved being able to make them in any length and thickness. It made a huge difference to the look of my jewelry so many years ago.
In the early years of this millennium, ball tipped headpins began being manufactured in India. They are, I think generally made with some automation, but I may be wrong.
The Balinese have been making fancy head pins for many years, but at the time of writing they are made with soft wire. For me, my head pins rule!
1 comment
Being able to make headpins, jump rings, earwires, and other small findings has been such a great help. Long before I started making beads, I learned to do wire work from your little book, Kate!