Necklace – Hopefully Creative

Silver Elephant

Silver elephant for a necklace.

The aim of the third project in my jewelry course was to do more soldering to get more faith in that. I had to think of something that I wanted to make and in the days preceding that class, I started looking around for inspiration. My one party trick is that I can fold an origami elephant from almost any piece of paper, for example a receipt. I’ve also got one of those elephants on my desk, and I thought, why not immortalize this in silver?!

Silver elephant next to a piece of paper with the original plan.

So I looked for a line drawing to base my elephant on. In the end, I combined two different pins (one and two) and set out to make an simplified elephant. I used square wire and made the different shapes by filing sections away in the corners, bending those and then soldering those joints. The order of operations was purple first, then blue then green. Attach those three together. Make the orange and attach it. Make the brown and attach it. Put the red on and attach a longer bit of lavender and saw that to length. The end of the trunk was almost completely filled in, so I used a drill and my saw to make the hole a bit more obvious.

Order of the silver sections added to the Silver elephant

Lastly, I added a little loop to the back so I could hang him on something. I didn’t want him to be high shine, so I kept the front and back slightly matt, but polished the outside edges to a shine. I found a spang (I don’t know the translation, but it’s a round cord for the neck) in my stash that fit perfectly and would put him at a nice height on my chest. My instructor was very proud that the final product looked so close to the plan and of the finishing and soldering that I’d done. I’m also happy with it and hope to wear it sometime.

Penguin Embroidery

A little penguin necklace for those days that needle a little more joy.

One Tuesday, I was sitting in my house, enjoying my day off and thought: what will I do today. The answer turned out to be ‘browse for small embroidery patterns and make a tiny hoop necklace’. I’ve had these small hoops in the collection for a while, but forgot they existed so I bought more not very long ago and then promptly found the others. I hadn’t actually finished any yet, so now was the perfect time. I figured out how big the embroidery could be (14 by 14 stitches in the circle) and went on to look for ‘alpha patterns’. I think they are used for friendship bracelets, but it works well for cross stitch too.

The pattern I used was of a little penguin and made by RIVAI. You can find it here. I added some extra stitches to the bottom to fill the frame. I only used four colours, but they were very effective. The black penguin has a white belly, an orange beak and a light blue background. It’s just that little bit derpy that it becomes adorable. It also makes me think of the Pengu cartoon penguin, so that brings much joy!

Kiwi!

So, my mother’s birthday was a while ago and we had a party!
The theme was colours, so everyone was expected to wear something in a fun colour. I assigned myself green, so I could wear my green pants, with a kiwi sash (see below for kiwi sash).

I was planning on wearing a black top with a cowl/drape front bit. So, I figured I had to make something nice to go over the top of it. Otherwise black is black and that is, apparently, boring. I started thinking and made the choice to make a green bead necklace. However, it wouldn’t only be green beads, I also wanted to make kiwi beads. I got out my fimo clay and started the work.

Green beads were easy, just roll green clay into beads and stick a pin through it to form the hole. (Admittedly they sat on the living room table for about 3 days before I punched the holes, since I was distracted at some point.)
For the kiwi beads I looked at the matching sash for the green pants (and clearly missed the light middle part). I started with a small green roll, then added really thin alternating green and black rolls to the outside. Another layer of green and black tiny rolls was added. Then a layer of green and a layer of darker green was added to the outside. I mixed some random bits I had left over and they made brown (which leftovers always seem to do). I rolled out the brown very thinly and added it around the roll. I rolled out the now quite fat roll to tighten the cane and make it a bit smaller.

I made green-ish beads as a base bead that I could stick three kiwi slices on. I did that a couple of times, until I thought I had enough of the kiwi sliced beads. I still had about 15 cm of kiwi-cane left. So I decided to chop of about 1 cm bits and round out one of the sides. This would form half a kiwi (like the one above). I poked holes through those too, and chucked all of it in the oven. They cooled down and I got extremely frustrated with the wire I chose. It is metal ish and quite thin, but it holds knots very well. I also likes to tangle and fall of the ‘wireholder(?)’. So I yelled at it, but in the end it cooperated and I made myself a necklace. This is it.

The shorted wire holds green beads, the longest the half kiwis and the middle is the sliced kiwis. I like it, and have worn it since the party!

Jewellery

So the visit to town on Wednesday landed me some other goodies too. I’ve been looking for some big red beads since my mother showed me her necklace.

I made the red plaid skirt some time ago and found that wearing a black/grey is turtle neck with it and that necklace looked really nice. So I’ve wanted to make one for myself. I couldn’t really find any nice red (and affordable) beads, so I opted to go with purple. To add some difference I added some black beads and some white swirly ones. I really like the finished look.

The other bits I made were two earrings for my mother. She wanted some over the top earrings to wear during samba performances. So they needed to be in the samba colours, yellow and blue. However, we found it was difficult to find some in the shop. So when we were in the bead shop, we got two square donuts and two blue beads for in the donuts, to make her some earrings. I had some feathers at home and some other bits and bobs like the hooks and something to secure the feathers with. And within 5 minutes my mom had some over the top samba earrings.

Tag: Necklace