I got the idea for the necklace from another necklace that just sort of happened a day in front of the tv set. I liked the idea of a ‘random’ pearl necklace with, of course, crystals, and in the beginning there were pendants of hearts both back and front in different colors but it quickly came out way to blingy and a little tacky, so I toned down the multicoloring and lost the pendants and was quite happy with it. The only pendantish bead left on it was a small AB tinted flower.


The whole lot are Swarovskis, which I get at Perles & Co where they are reasonably priced. That said, this is easily the most expensive necklace I’ve ever made.


I can’t remember where I first saw the backdrop necklaces, but I’m guessing a photo of some 30s willowy beauty. Alas, I am myself not of the willowy kind, and a silky 30s gown with open back was very much out of the question (it would also have required me smoking vogue cigarettes with a black ivory cigarette holder and, well, there are a few problems with that scenario).

Anyways. The necklace is strung on nylon and has an odd shape since you need a strand going around your neck, otherwise it won’t stay on your back. Unless you make it waaaaay longer and move very carefully. The neck strand has a silver heart clasp to allow you to put it on, and this is how it all turned out:

I love a certain kind of enamel jewellery. Like Pilgrim’s Velvet series. So for hair jewellery for the wedding I got myself a bracelet, ripped it apart, stuck it to hairpins and put it in my hair.

I got the coque feathers from ebay – search for millinery feathers. They are glued between two small patches of white felt that were then stiched to the back of the three medium flowers that were fastened together with thin wire and attached to the hair clip. The same for the other hair clip with three flowers, and the largest flower (that I couldn’t find for the photo) I stuck on to a large bobby pin, also with the help of wire.

For the birdcage veil I bought a bit of french netting – sold in hat shops if your craft shop is not amazingly well stocked – and played around with it, after reading a few online instructions. There’re two nice edges to netting, and if you do like me you’ll miss both of them doesn’t matter much, but try to get one of the nice edges to fall across your face

My veil was not fastened in any way, just put on top of my hair but if you want it stuck properly you can put a comb or hair pins in it, of course. Most people do.

Amazingly, in the 1400+ photos we have from our wedding, the feather hair clip did not get one good pic. I guess that is because people tend to take photos of the bride’s face, not the back of her head. But still…

One of the first things that has to be completed about a wedding are the invitations. After you decide on venue, ceremony time and other stuff that has to go in the invitation, that is.
We didn’t really have a theme, or a theme colour either. Looking back, I’m guessing the theme was “country chic” and out colour scheme was…erm…”summer ice cream”. Anyway, I never missed the non existing theme other then when we were designing the invitations. If we’d had only the blues or the greens or the pinks to choose from, it would have saved us a lot of time.

We came up with the general design pretty early; “tags” in an inner envelope with a sort of ticket carnet/postcard feeling. Then we ordered cardstock from a couple of different webshops and spent a few afternoons in craft shops in Stockholm and prototyped colours and size for a couple of weekends. The cardstock shades we decided on came from a nearby scrapbooking store, Handarbeta, where the owner Sofia even lent us her paper trimmer, as she had none in stock to sell. It helped us immensely, needless to say.

We did the text layout in Power point and printed “a few” test tags on our printer before we cut the cardstock and printed it, four tags at a time. The tags are cut in different lengths and embossed with little squares on the edge of the top two. We coloured sticker dots the right beige, punched holes through them and tied the tags together with a friendship knot. The green inner envelopes are just folded over to make a snug tunnel to keep the tags in place. The ‘stamp’ is a photo of two of our many ducks cut with shape scissors and the postage stamp over it with the text Emma & David - We are getting married – 12 June 2010 we designed and ordered from My cards.

From My cards we also ordered the stamp in the bottom right corner. It is based on an Egyptian passport stamp and has our names, the date, the place etc on it. We changed the words around a little and printed magnets with the RSVP date on them so people would remember to answer. I don’t know if that’s why, but of our 78 invited guests only one had not RSVP’d on the date!

Whoa! Almost eight months since my last post? Really? I blame the wedding. And the moving of web hotels. But mostly the wedding. The wedding was on June 12th, a beautiful though a little rainy Saturday in county Dalarna. Of course, there was quite a lot of crafty things going into this wedding and I plan on blogging them all here, but I’ll start with the most recently created: the wedding picture vintage style necklace.

 

 

In the photo you can see the finished result and the photo I started with. I cropped the photo and turned it black and white with Picasa, printed it on photo paper, glued it to the photo jewellery plate and covered it with a random scrapbooking thing D gave me once, something called “Sepia accents”, a glue-like medium that is slightly pink-orangeish and dries to resemble resin. Above it I made a wire link with two Swarovski beads, some of the one I used to make my actual wedding necklace. Added a dragonfly pendant to the chain and that’s it.

For my birthday last spring I got a present from my sister in law and her family; to choose lampwork beads from Babs Beads and Design. Susanne, lampwork artist and friend of sister in law C, makes little works of art out of glass and I particularly like her hearts. A few days ago I finally managed to choose and order some beads and when they arrived yesterday I immediately crafted an idea I got the other day.

I’ve bought a few sample packs of photo and print paper at Kjell & co, since they cost next to nothing and contain a few fun paper styles I’m too cheap to buy full packages of. Among other things they contain t-shirt print paper and I got the idea to make necklaces with printed text on them – I love music (who doesn’t) and the lyrics to music are always important to me and I would love to carry lyrics as visible decoration too, since they decorate my life so much.

For a while I couldn’t do much about it, I couldn’t find narrow enough cotton ribbon and the textile print paper won’t stick on satin ribbon, and also none of the designs popping around in my head really made me want to sit down and do anything about it. But the other day I found 3 mm wide white cotton ribbon, surfed on Babs Art fire page and voilá knew how I wanted it.

So here it is: official Christmas necklace of 2009!

Working with the textile transfer paper was a little trickier than I had thought (or, actually, I hadn’t thought much about it at all). Since you can’t see the printed side once you put it down and then placed the iron over it, tiny things like 2,8 mm text can get displaced. And when you’re on a 3 mm ribbon, there is no room for displacement. If you think before you do you may get it right the first time. If you’re more like me – try first, think, try again, repeat until it works – here’s a tip about what I’ve learned:

It’s spring in some parts of the world, for example in NZ, where B lives with her husband C and their kids A and LB and also Nana D. All of them except for C also celebrate their birthdays in spring, which is a good excuse to make necklaces for everyone!

Everyone, that is, but C. There is just nothing I can make out of the stuff I have in my beadboxes that would not look silly on this man – or, come to think of it, most men. I’m not very conservative in what men and women should or should not wear and do, but scroll down the gallery and try to imagine any of the designs on any grown man. Jewellery on men – absolutely! Beaded jewellery on men? Not so easy…

Anyways, for the others I toted together some things. For A, who is 4 and, I gather, a rather cool dude and big brother I made a necklace of faux grey stone and silver-and-turqoise desert sun beads. It has a magnetic clasp so there is no danger of it hurting him if it should get stuck on something while he’s climbing and running around. Little sister LB is 2 and for her I made a Y-shaped necklace in pink and white with a swarovski heart and pink lilies leading down to it, and for their mother B  an affirmation ring necklace for Love. Nana got a longer version of one of my own favourites that I hope ‘goes with everything’ for her too.

Hope you have a lovely spring and summer, guys, I miss you!

I spent last weekend in a small shop in an industrial area not very far from where I live. I and two other similarly inclined attended Wilton course 4 – Fondant and Gumpaste and learned how to cover and decorate cakes with sugar paste and make decorations from flower and modelling paste. It was a lot of fun and now there’s only one problem – we’re not that big on eating cakes…I’ll have to find reasons to bake some soon though cause I really want to practise and realise a few of my ideas =)

Dream and love and love and dream – these are two necklaces for a mother-daughter combo. They are made in the same mode as the previous one in this post, but with the addition of a separate pendant a bit up the chain on both. To make sure the necklace keeps its ‘shape’ with the extra pendant on the side I’ve secured the main pendant with a thin wire so that it won’t move around on the chain.

The pink, silver and turquoise one is for little m and the black, silver and dark peacock one for mother m. I like that I managed to find both affirmation rings and tags to match ‘diagonally’ for them both.

Well, can you? This is a question we are all bound to ask sooner or later…or not. Anyway, I asked it and tried it and here is the answer -No, you cannot.

You can stamp the fabric and get the embossing powder to stick, of course, but when you heat it the gluey-plastic-stuff that makes it embossed melts into the fabric and does not raise. I tried on three different materials:

Cotton canvas (grey/white) – the stamp does not sink through the fabric but doesn’t stay on top of it either

Thai silk (green/silver, bottom left) – the stamp melts right through the fabric and can be seen from the other side

Cotton-polyester stretch mix (blue/white) – the heat melted the actual fabric as well as the embossing powder…

The stamp motif also became a little fuzzy due to the melting, but I guess you could use this technique if wanting to stamp fabric and make it stick – be careful when heating synthetic fabric though, as mine melted.

Ok,  pink-and-gold are not my usual colours, but this necklace just made itself in my hands!

It is of collier length, strung on nylon string. The heart is approx 25 mm across and both that and the little butterfly above it is in the yellowish crystal AB. In the necklace are various glass beads in light nougat, dark green, rose gold and pink, as well as a lot of 4mm swarovskis in ‘Light Coloroade Topaz’ and ‘Sand Opal’. Plus one in the rose-reddish, beautiful colour ‘Padparadscha’.

Now I’ll just have to make the earrings to match it.