chezlin ·
This week I'll be walking you through how to make a necklace with some drooping chains hanging down. This is an intermediate level project because part of the necklace will be fabricated by hammering the metal and drilling into it.
Let me know what you think of this finished necklace! I quite like how it turned out!
chezlin ·
chezlin ·
So, as I mentioned a week or so ago, I recently got my ears pierced, and I've been making earrings all over the place in anticipation of being able to wear more cute stuff on my ears. Out of the blue I decided I wanted some cute, simple heart shaped studs and I had some left over brass from previous projects and decided that was the perfect material for these studs. I also took the time to take some progress pictures for you all to enjoy!
You can't tell from this picture, but it's actually two pieces of brass sandwiched and held together with rubber cement. I drew a small heart on a piece of paper and glued it onto the brass for a template.
Cutting cutting! It is very hard to take progress pictures like this with one hand.
Here they are cut out and ready to be filed. It was kind of a pain since they were super tiny, but eventually I managed it.
All done filing, so cute!
To attach the hearts to my earring posts, I used this two part epoxy.
Gluing. I kept having to readjust the posts because I was impatient and kept trying to move the earrings around before the glue had set, so the posts were getting nudged around everywhere.
And here they are complete! Again, I couldn't do any in the ear action shots because the holes are still healing but I really love how they turned out! It's really killing me that I can't wear all these earrings I've been making recently.
chezlin ·
Like a lot of crafters, I have an excess of crafty things laying around my house. Lately, I've been trying to work my way through unfinished projects and extra materials I have. I also recently got 2nd ear piercings so I've been very excited to make myself some earrings that will fit in normal ear holes! (I have my original ear piercings stretched a bit, so normal piercings fall right out.) So combine trying to use up crafting materials with the need for new earrings, and that equates to me making over 20 different types of earrings in one day. After the first few ones I decided I should document the making of them!
Here are some of the materials I used in the beginning. As I went on I slowly added more and more out of necessity.
Materials pictured are:
Materials not pictured:
At this point, I knew I wanted to make some pointy black earrings. Unfortunately I could only dig up my skin colored sculpey, so after researching online for a little bit, I saw that some people colored their clay with permanent markers. I figured I could give it a try!
I flattened out the clay and colored it black.
Then I just worked the clay until it was a solid color. I repeated this process until it was as dark as I wanted.
Here's the final color compared to the original skin colored clay. Pretty drastic change! I have to say, this method worked out very, very well. Will use again!
Now I'll do a play by play of how I made the earrings~
I cut equal parts of the clay and rolled it into spikes.
Using a sharp blade, I cut the top at an angle.
I made a few of these and I highlighted the flat area with various things like glitter and metallic pigments.
The lid had plenty of pigment on it, so I just rubbed the flat area around on it.
Ta da! I had to do the glittery ones after baking, so you shall see those in a few pictures.
I wanted to make some ombre earrings, so I just dipped the ends into the pigment, and using my fingers I smoothed and faded it out.
Ta da!
I wanted to make dangly earrings, but I only had earring posts like these:
So I had to be inventive. I figured I could take a small amount of clay and some open eye pins and make little studs that I could attach the dangly part off of.
Unfortunately I only had head pins. So I had to make my own open eye pins. Also, since the studs were going to be so small and I wanted to make sure the pin would stay, I made figure 8 shapes out of the pins and squished then into a small ball of clay.
Like so. Then I squished it onto the earring post to make the back of it flat.
I ended up baking them like this to make sure they'd stay flat and then carefully popped the posts off and reattached them with glue.
Anyway, after making all my random clay pieces, I threw them in the oven to bake. According to my clay I baked them at 275F for 15 minutes.
Done baking! Also, the picture quality after baking kind of suffered because a storm decided to blow in and engulf all the nice natural sunlight that is the key to taking awesome pictures. Now, I love me some good thunderstorms, but only when I'm not trying to take photos for my blog!
After baking, I took a paper towel and rubbed off the excess pigment. I originally intended to seal these pieces with a clear acrylic sealer, but I couldn't find my sealer(I must have left it back in Texas :( ) and they actually don't rub off any pigment at all after taking the excess off. I also ended up liking the matte-ness that the black clay ended up getting after baking as well.
As promised, here is the glittering.
I basically just painted top coat nail polish onto the area I wanted glittered (here being the flat part) and then dunked it into the glitter. I used my finger to gently pat the glitter flat and into the to coat and tapped off the excess. I repeated this process with the black glitter. After they dried, I glued on the earring posts using this fella:
A two part epoxy glue. A little goes a long way, especially with earrings (even with the mass quantity I did) but it does set quite fast so you have to work quickly. I ended up having to mix up about 3 different small batches of glue to do all these suckers.
Here they are all glued up! After curing for a few minutes they were set enough for me to attach the dangly earrings together, and I was done! Woo hoo!
(Note: you may notice the ombre spikes I made for the dangly earrings here in the front right of the picture. I forgot to mention that before baking, I made eye pins for them and stuck them in. Then, after baking, just to be sure they would stay in place, I took the pin out, dipped it in the epoxy glue and stuck it back in. I've had problems before with polymer clay jewelry slipping off of straight pins after baking, so I like to do this just to ease my mind.)
And these are some of them completed! I wanted to display them on my ears, but they're still healing so I can't take out the studs for a little while. So my hands will just have to do instead. And in the mean time I get to stare at these guys every day until my ears are healed!
Here are two dangly ones. I actually love how they all turned out and I can't wait until I can wear them!
chezlin ·
I'm trying to revive this poor blog, and to do so I plan on posting more entries from my phone. I'm excited because I will be able to be more spontaneous with my posts. This post right now is going to be about my current crafty fail. Recently I've been having a string of craft fails, most of them involving knitting somehow, but today it involves a project that I've done before. A while ago I told my sister I would make her a braided bracelet with black embroidery thread, and while looking through my crafting pile of crap I found some black embroidery thread so I figured I could make her bracelet right then! I got everything together, cut the thread and started braiding. I hadn't made one of these in a while so it took a bit for me to remember how to braid it onto the chain, but once I got it I flew through it. And then it happened.
I ran out of thread. Noooooooo. Guess I'll be running out to the craft store later today! In the mean time I'll be attempting work on my next knitting project- socks- which I've never done before. I don't know if this is a good idea.
chezlin ·
If you hadn't noticed, I've been in a crafting slump. The other day my younger sister showed me some earrings she wanted to purchase for prom but she didn't like the wooden beads on them. I guess my craft starved mind needed sustenance because before I knew what I was doing, I told her "I'll make you some!"
And I gathered my supplies...
And then decided I'd share the process with you all!
The materials: -feathers -jewelry findings -jewelry pliers -jump rings -spacers or beads -easily bendable wire -sturdy wire* -hoop template*
*These are optional - I made my own hoops because I couldn't find any big enough.
Here are the inspiration earrings. From Asos.
Mark three inches from the tip of the feather. See my earrings? Made those to test this process out :)
Cut on your mark.
After cutting them I stripped the barb about 1/4" from the end.
Cut about 3 inches off of your bendy wire.
Wrap the wire about the end of the feather. I got this technique from Corrine over at Craftovision(yaay, she's back!). Check out the video here to see how do do this.
Here they are, all wrapped up!
Here I took the sturdy wire and used the template to help shape it the way I wanted. Not pictured, I used my jewelry pliers to loop around one end of the wire.
I strung the feathers and spacers on and then looped the other end of the wire.
Connected with a jump ring.
Attached the earring finding and voila!
I sure hope they work for her! I enjoyed making these earrings so much that I ended up making a few other pairs that I'm going to put up in my Etsy store, so if you want to pick some up then you can head over there!
Also, these earrings are sold out!
chezlin ·
It's been a while, but I finally put some more items on my Etsy store. Go check them out!
Here are some of them:
Snow Owl
Creepy Eel
Butterfly
The Bite
Singing Bird
Busy Bee
chezlin ·
I was browsing through Craftster a few days ago and saw a super cute bracelet made by fellow poster milesapart714 that she made based off a $300+ designer bracelet. Her version was $3 and, in my opinion, much cuter. I just knew I had to make one. The next day I drove off to my nearest craft store and headed straight to the jewelry section. Everyone that lives around me must have had the same idea because all of the short chains suitable for this bracelet were sold out, so I had to settle on buying a 60" chain which was thankfully on sale! After gathering all the materials; chain, jewelry findings, a charm and embroidery thread my total came to $7 bucks. A little bit more expensive than milesapart714, but I now have enough materials to make a few of those bracelets and more if I really wanted to. Here are some pictures of the making of the bracelet:
All my materials gathered up. I used a darker silvery chain because it matches more of my stuff.
I taped the ends of the thread so it would be easier to thread through the chain
Here it is, finished!
Some close ups:
All in all, I wish I got a bigger chain but I do like how mine turned out.
I had some of the embroidery thread left over that was already bunched up and ready for more braiding, but not enough for another bracelet, so I tried my hand at doing something small... a ring! Here's a picture of it:
I hadn't sealed the knots yet with glue or clear nail polish because the bracelet didn't seem like it needed any, but the ring is already starting to unravel so I decided to be safe and seal them.
Big props to milesapart714 and her awesome tutorial! Check it out here: http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?topic=356098.0 and while you're at it, swing by their blog: http://www.studs-and-pearls.com/
