It has been a glorious summer here, exploring all sorts of new crafting ideas like cyanotypes and natural dyes and hand-stitching scrolls on vintage thread spools. But my true love, the one I keep coming back to, is rock wrapping. And I just realized that although I’ve been sharing some of my rock-wrapping adventures on my Instagram and YouTube channels, I’ve forgotten to share them here, too! So here’s a bit of an end-of-summer (whimper) catch-up on fun rock wraps I’ve made this summer.
The first one is pretty simple, just a nice rock wrap with a bit of a weave at the centre of two axes and a spiral wrapped around them. I filmed it and then accelerated it so you see the whole rock wrap start to finish in under 90 seconds. Here it is on YouTube:
Oooh, it’s very big when I share it like that, LOL!
Then, later in the summer I filmed a much longer video showing how I deconstructed a basic Carrick bend mat to adapt it to a rock wrap. This video is much longer, and while it’s not really an in-depth tutorial on how to do this rock wrap, I think you could probably use it in conjunction with a Carrick bend mat tutorial (like the one I linked to) to figure this one out for yourself. It runs about 14 minutes.
And finally, this one is a little silly. One day in the spring, it occurred to me that it would be fun to wrap a really big rock, like a boulder. I happen to live in an area with lots of erratics and other boulders dug up from when the houses were being built and then adapted for landscaping, so I’ve been eyeballing my neighbour’s boulders and wondering which one I could approach to ask to borrow their rock. Lucky for them and for me, I found the perfect rock in a local park. I had a lot more of the yellow rope than what I used and had envisioned a slightly more elaborate wrap than what I actually achieved here, but (a) we were in a bit of a time crunch and I was more trying to get this done as a proof of concept than anything and (b) the cheap rope was exactly that – cheap and tangly and not fun to work with. But, I did manage to execute a rock wrap on a giant scale! And in case you were wondering, I did not leave the wrap in place. Leave nothing but footprints, right? Maybe I can find some fun biodegradeable and environmentally friendly material to leave a wrapped boulder as public art one of these days.
Until then, here’s me with the help of my teenager, Lucas, wrapping a really big rock!
This weekend, I’m taking a course in how to use lapidary equipment to make cabochons and I have several ideas for new rock-wrapping tutorial videos, so expect a lot more rock-related content this autumn. And if all goes according to plan, I may have an exciting new announcement with regard to my book, How to Wrap Rocks.
Stay tuned, there are more rocks and rock wrapping adventures to come!