Weaving Tips || How to Make Your Own Copper Rod

Don’t you just love how weaves look hanging from copper?! The shiny metal really compliments the softness of a weave. I knew right away that I wanted to hang my peachy-pink weave along weave from copper. The peach and copper colors look so nice together. Also the visual weight of the copper next to the airy weave is a great design compliment.

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Want to know how to make a copper rod for hanging your weaves? It’s pretty simple, especially if you have the right tools. I want to share how I prepped this piece of copper for my weave, so that you can try it too if you wanted to include copper in your weaves too.

These are the supplies I used:

• Industrial copper pipe – I got mine at a local hardware store in the plumbing section
• Handsaw to cut the pipe
• Metal file for the sharp edge
• Polish for the copper – I didn’t buy anything fancy, but instead used this tutorial on how to polish copper using kitchen supplies. It worked really well!

Here are the simple steps:

step1|| measure how long you want your copper pipe to be.

step 2|| using the handsaw, cut the pipe at the proper length. This gets a little tricky at the beginning, but once you make a groove it’s easier to keep your cut line straight. Just make sure you don’t cut the pipe at an angle. Try to keep your sawing straight so that your cut will also be straight. Also, when you get towards the end of the cutting, resist the urge to just break the pipe off. You’ll have a nicer edge if you continue to cut all the way through.

step 3|| once you cut through your pipe, file the cut edge with your metal file. Make sure to file the outer edge, since it will be sharp also, without scratching up the sides of the pipe.

step 4|| polish the copper.

Ok before I get onto this part, I first want to point out that industrial copper pipe isn’t pretty, because that isn’t what it’s used for. It comes with gunk, printed letters, and some stamped letters. Lucky for us the gunk and the printed letters easily come off when you polish the copper. It came off especially easy for me when I followed that tutorial I told you about in the supply list. The stamped letters are here to stay, but they actually don’t really show when I hung the weave from the pipe. Also, since the stamped letters are on just one area of the copper pipe, they can be turned downward so that they are even harder to notice.

So, polish the copper to remove the gunk and printed lettering. You can do this by making your own polish or by using a polish you bought from a store.  As you can see in my pictures below, the copper shines up to a really pretty color that is almost a rose gold.  A huge improvement from how it looked in the store.

Step 5|| hang your weave!

See, it’s pretty simple. And because I have extra that I can share, I’m going to put a few pieces of copper pipe in the shop once I’m done making them pretty.

Happy Weaving!

Kate

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