Beaded Dangle Necklace

I saw this necklace over at My Girlish Whims and loved it right away. (She has great tutorials for beautiful jewelry pieces--this is one of my favorite blogs to browse for inspiration.)  I ended up making two different necklaces for myself and one each for my mom and mother-in-law for Mother's Day.  This necklace is great because you can switch around the colors to customize it to match an outfit.  The sparkly beads make it a little extra dressy.  The most challenging part was trying to find beads that were just the right size to space correctly across the chain.  I couldn't decide what I would wear more often, so I made one with gold chain and another with silver.  So happy with the way they turned out!

Multi-Strand Bracelet

I've been into wearing bracelets lately, and usually I wear small single-strand bracelets.  These pieces are really easy to throw together, and you can string one onto stretch cord in just a few minutes--no findings and no tools needed!  This time I thought I might experiment with something a little different:

This bracelet was fun to make.  I enjoyed experimenting with beads of different sizes, colors, materials, and opacity.  The final piece ended up with a combination of glass, metal, and semi-precious stones that I have accumulated over the years.  Usually everything I make is matchy-matchy in monochromatic colors, but this time I went with purposefully unmatched beads. 

I used a sterling silver multi-strand clasp and crimp beads to attach the four strands of beads.  It took me about an hour total to put this together.

 

 I love the feel of this bracelet when I wear it.  It has a good weight to it, and the variety of colors mean that it will match a lot of different outfits.  Now I just need to make some matching earrings!

Photo Pendant

This project was a sort of belated Mother's Day present to myself.  I adapted the pendant from this great tutorial at Polish the Stars.  I loved the idea of having a piece of jewelry with all four of the girls represented. 

Supplies needed:

• 1 inch by 1 inch photo
• Glass tiles (I bought the ones I used from this Etsy shop)
• Exacto knife
• Bail
• Super glue
• Dimensional adhesive

The first thing I did was to find a close up photo of the kids that still looked good when it was shrunken down to 1 inch by 1 inch.  I resized the picture in a Word document.  After printing it out, I placed the glass tile over the photo and used an exacto knife to cut around it. 

I put a few drops of the dimensional adhesive on the tile and used a toothpick to cover the entire surface.  No bubbles!  

I carefully put the photo face down on the tile and made sure that the edges were flush with the surface of the tile.  Some of the adhesive oozed out and I just used a paper towel to clean it up. 

 

Next I used super glue to attach the bail to the pendant.

And then one more layer of dimensional adhesive to cover the photo.  

 

After making sure that everything was super dry, I put the pendant onto a ball chain.  Now I've got my girls with me all the time!  

Since this was such an easy project, I made matching pendant necklaces for the three older girls.  Now we have a matching set, and they love wearing them.

Beaded "Charm" Bracelet

I got the inspiration for this bracelet from two places....M has been asking for a charm bracelet for a while.  When we went to Michael's, we were sort of disappointed to find out that it would be pretty expensive to buy enough charms to fill up a whole bracelet.  So we settled on buying one charm that she liked and then making the rest out of beads and other trinkets we had at home.  I also saw a beautiful charm bracelet on Anthropology's website that sort of provided some inspiration as well.  It was super full of charms and winter-themed.  Gorgeous!

Anyways, I didn't take very many photos of the process (I'm never sure if my projects is going to turn out and I forget to take pics).  The idea and the materials needed are simple.  Basically, I measured chain long enough to fit around my wrist and made a bunch of "charms" using whatever random beads I had in my stash and headpins.  Then I just opened up the chain links and put the charms on.  I used a toggle clasp to finish off the bracelet.

I ended up making two different versions of the bracelet.  One for K using less charms so you can see more of the chain and one for myself (photo) which is a fuller bracelet with more beads.  It's just a matter of preference.  I think I will have to try another in a different color scheme!