I came across Corra Liew's wire work many years ago.  She is the Malaysian designer behind Decors.  She was the first person I knew who attempted Chinese knotting in wire.

The Pipa wire knot (shown below) was her first in a collection of knot inspired designs and tutorials. Pipa knots - named after a Chinese string instrument - are usually made with cord so wire is particularly challenging.

Corra went on to create all kinds of knot inspired designs. Shown here are my favorites from her store.


Wire work is an exacting technique, requiring a lot of practice.  How much practice is enough? I particularly liked a post Corra wrote in her Facebook page :

"Someone just told me “you can’t rush art”.

When I was making handmade jewelry, I was often caught in deciding when fine is fine, when perfect is perfect...

And now that I look back the box I have all the unfinished pieces, they were all such awesome designs / ideas... just that they are unfinished, and, never been published nor shared.

Being an artist my biggest struggle then was to decide on how to end a design, many, many designs left unfinished because I can’t find a way to end them. In the later stage of my designing career I took a step back and changed some terminologies - it became easier when I end my design as an “project”, it became “how do I end an project”, instead of “how do I end a design”.

Can’t relate?

Imagine Steve Jobs waited until the technologies were perfect to product his ideal iPhone...

Imagine George Lucas waited until the technologies were perfect to produce Star-wars...

It may never happened.

Great work takes time. Sure enough. But sometimes the imperfections need to exist first, for the more advanced tools and technologies to be needed, to be created, to polish, to perfect a piece of art.

My signature design, PIPA earrings, were poorly constructed when I first released it, I took years to improve it, and countless others took years to personalize it. You can’t rush art, but I believe imperfections should be allowed and accepted.

For you artists out there, it is absolutely fine to present your work to the world before it was perfect, you don’t know how far that design can go when it’s presented, you don’t know what you or it could achieve."

The demands of family life is such that Corra doesn't have time to make jewelry much these days. But we are fortunate to be able to learn from her through her tutorials.

Corra is offering an incentive : "Buyers will automatically receive a referral code after purchase, and they could use that to help new buyer to get 10% back while they receive USD$5 per new friend they introduced."












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Disclosure
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Original Post by THE BEADING GEM
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