Inspiration is a peculiar animal

I've probably touched on this before in previous posts but it never ceases to amaze me.  If you've read my posts from the last few days you'll know that I have new toys. If  you haven't, then go read for goodness sake.  Keep up.  Anyway, I wanted to play with my new toys so I started browsing through old magasines looking for something easy that I could make to try out the Thing-a-ma-jig and the anvil.

I saw this:

No obvious opportunity for anvil work here but definite potential for playing with the Thing-a-ma-jig.  Being me, I didn't particulary read the instructions.  I looked at the picture.  Then I looked at my copper wire collection.  I've recently decided I like copper much more than gold or silver so it has to be copper.  I fiddled with the pegs on the Thing-a-ma-jig and experimented with a couple of pieces of wire.  Then I put my creations on the anvil and did a bit of gentle tapping with a chase hammer to see what happened.  I looked at the picture again, rummaged through my wire... and ended up making these:

Apologies for the quality of the photo.  They do actually look much better in the flesh but the weather has been far too wet to think about venturing outdoors to my photographic studio (the back garden) so I had to make do with an organza wrap laid over the seat of one of the livingroom chairs.  You can see the similarities between my inspriation and the finished article though can't you?  No?  Oh well, back to the drawing board.  BTW, I didn't use the Thing-a-ma-jig at all for these earrings but I did get to use the anvil.

One of these days the jewellery I make will actually bear more than a passing resemblance to my original concept.

UPDATE:  I manged to take slightly better photos so these are now listed on Etsy:

Copper and gold square coiled earrings