Trace pattern from piece of origami paper onto shrink plastic with a sharpie and ruler.  Cut out.  Punch hole.  Melt.  Add jump ring.  Pretty necklace!

I love how it turned out and I’m currently wearing it with a V-neck.  I think this might be my final excuse for buying one of those geometric pattern coloring books I had as a kid.

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Eddy and Edwina posted this cool work-in-progress shot of a necklace she made from some pretty colored beads.  In the comments she reveals they are actually those plastic fuse beads you make designs out of and melt together.  Genius.  A bit o’ Googling also turned up a fuse bead bracelet tutorial by nkitkat.

It just so happens that I have a bunch of these left over from a couple of years ago.

Bracelets on waxed twine threaded back and forth, linked with a loop of elastic so they go over the wrist

Pink/red/white/another pink on elastic

Necklace strung on waxed linen

I think they kind of evoke the colorful glass beads in Ronni Kappos‘s jewelry, which I love (more here).

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Not very successful night of crafting.  I got the December issue of Martha Stewart and went 0 for 2 in attempted crafts.  They have a pattern for cute knotted ribbon wreathes, which didn’t seem to go as diagrammed.  Not sure quite what I’m doing wrong, but there seems to be a twist that I was missing.  There’s also an article about stuff to make with those yarn flower looms.  I have a similar jig that I thought might work, but I was apparently wrong.  The result looked rather ridiculous and I threw it away.

That’s when I put the magazine down and retreated to my old faithful craft, embroidery.  I’d bookmarked this stool and table that had been cross stitched using custom drilled holes.  Then this week noshii‘s awesome wood jewelry got posted all over the place and reminded me that I’d been meaning to experiment with this idea and had even bought the wood tiles a while back.

So I charged up the dremel tool, penciled a guide on the wood tiles, drilled some tiny holes, and stitched. It’s harder to be precise than I thought it would be, so the holes aren’t spaced as evenly as I had intended, but I kind of like the wonky cross stitches, especially in the variegated thread.  For the rectangle one, I drilled a bigger hole to fit a grommet.  They both have felt glued to the back to hide the threads.

This is definitely a method I’ll try again.

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I’ve been admiring the crochet jewelry from Wren Handmade for a while now, so I was really excited to see her pattern for a crochet bracelet on the Purl Bee.  Had to make it right away!

I think my sister-in-law gave me the fun variegated purple crochet thread way back when.  Button from who knows where.

The pattern was easy to follow, and now I’m thinking up what other stitch patterns might make fun bracelets.

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I got to spend last weekend with Becket and Amy in what I hope are becoming yearly get-togethers (last year was Seattle).  Becket already posted about some of our fun.  One of the things we made were these fun fabric bead necklaces from Curious Bird’s tutorial.

You sew a tube from a silky scarf and alternate beads and knots.  Our “homework” was to find scarves to bring.  I have had this neat Japanese silk scarf in my fabric collection (can’t remember where I got it, unfortunately), and I really like how the pattern leads to unexpected bead combos.

Amy’s was even more interesting because she sliced a long diagonal piece of her scarf and it ended up perfectly symmetrical due to her excellent knot tying.  I think the bias cut made her knots more even than mine too.

You’ll have to go read CA Crafter to see more of Becket’s. :)

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Another finished resin necklace! I gave it to Becket for her birthday. It’s a piece of origami paper embedded in resin, molded in a pill box (originally shown here). I’ve been having a hard time keeping my resin stuff from being sticky unless I sand it, which makes it cloudy instead of nice and shiny and clear unless you go crazy on the polishing. So this time I sprayed it with a gloss sealant, which seems to have done the trick. I glued a little slice of clear tubing to the top with E6000, and threaded it on weed-whacker line. I could not find tubing *anywhere* at the store. I had to buy some other beads that used the tubing as a spacer. I really like how it looks, though, and the E6000 is my new resin glue of choice.

Here’s a zoom of the clasp. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before: I just threaded the line through a magnet clasp and melted the other end into a ball so it won’t pull through. It worked great, finished the sharp plastic edges, and seems very strong.  It’s also very easy to shorten so Becket can choose a good length for her.

I just love the way it turned out. Definitely will be making more of these!  In fact, I am visiting Becket right now, and we spent the day in Japantown where I bought a bunch of new papers. :)

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My sister is getting married today.  As a surprise, my entire family (including the brothers-in-law) is wearing purple, her favorite color.  It’s a beach wedding, so Mark is going the Miami Vice route, haha.  I got a pretty cute dark purple jersey dress from Anthropologie, but I knew I had to make a few accessories to liven it up.

Becket made me this awesome clip (pattern from Last Minute Fabric Gifts) that I’m going to put in my hair.

Necklace made of little purple doll buttons.  I think it’ll look good with the plunging neckline.  (my instructions)

And a flower badge to pin to my shoulder strap.  The flower style was inspired by Giant Dwarf, expecially her felt fascinators, but I made it from ultrasuede.  (The color balance is better in person.)

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Since stringing my sister’s resin necklace on weedwhacker cord worked so well, I’ve been itching to make myself a necklace with it.  Poking around in the toolbox that I keep all my jewelry stuff in, I found these Japanese felt beads I got from Reprodepot a while back (they’ve got them in a ton of colors in the notions section) and wondered if I could force them onto the cord.  I had to made a hole first with progressively bigger needles, and cut the cord at an angle to make a point, but it actually worked pretty well.  It’s got the same adjusting mechanism as the resin one, and I think it’ll look good at a choker length.

Mixed in with the beads, I had even already glued a darker pink one into a bezel cup to make a ring and then never finished it.  Now I have a set.

p.s. Looks like a couple of Etsy sellers have some great variations on this idea!

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At home, I finally had enough free time to fashion a few pairs of earrings from some shank buttons I had collected. The most difficult part is removing the shank! The stars were plastic, and Dad ground them down for me using a bench grinder.

The little flowers turned out to be metal, and they are slightly curved, so after I cut off the shank using a Dremel cutoff wheel it was still too much shank, so Dad used a round grinding stone on his drill press, and we ground off the shank. In the process, we managed to mar the buttons a bit (we were holding them with pliers), so I ground out the scratches on the Dremel and then used Crocus Cloth to give them an all-over treatment.  I had never used this metal polishing cloth before, but it was flexible enough to fit into the small corners of the piece. The cloth gave them a matte finish that looks a bit like sterling. It turned out that underneath the surface, the metal was reddish, which I really like- it brings out the detail. We used straight wire cutters to modify the earring backs so they wouldn’t show through (and I smoothed them out with the Dremel). It’s fun to be home with Dad’s amazing tool collection for something like this.

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My favorite Martha Stewart issue of every year came this week. Yay, ornament crafts. There’s a pretty good spread on doily crafts, one of which is a bunch of doilies treated with fabric stiffener and strung in a garland. I wanted to recreate it, but I didn’t feel like getting doilies. Instead I used this funny pillowcase I bought at Ikea a few years ago. The pattern looks like papercut snowflakes. I cut out a bunch and saturated them with Stiffy (lol), blotted the excess, and let them dry on freezer paper. They wrinkled up a bit as they dried, so I ironed them afterward (between sheets of paper, because who knows what that junk would do to an iron). Strung them on sparkly crochet thread I had around, and what a cute garland for the front window. I think I will make a second one to go right next to it.

While I was laying them out, I could tell some of the little snowflakes were going to be too small for the garland and scrunched them out of the way. When they dried, they made these neat bell shapes that I thought would look cool as a necklace. I only had a few that turned out nice, so the last thread end is 2 dots also cut from the fabric pattern and glued back-to-back. While I was threading them onto the waxed twine, I realized the similarities to the blissen fabric flower necklaces. Now I feel bad about being a copy cat :/

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