Tag Archives: upcycled

Coral necklace upcycling project

I haven’t posted in a while, due mainly to a lack of motivation and a lack of projects to post about! However, I have just finished what for me has been quite a big jewellery project, involving many nights watching Family Guy while passing nylon bead thread through many tiny coral beads.

The jumping off point for the project was this broken homemade necklace:

It’s not clear from the photo how this would have looked when worn (sadly one of the strands was broken otherwise I would have put it on and taken a picture), but it consisted of three different-length strands of coral beads, interspersed with some rather horrid imitation pearls where the pearl finish had worn off, leaving naked plastic behind.

I decided to restring the necklace – again, it would have three strands, but they’d be of equal length and the plastic pearls would no longer feature. I ended up with three strands, each just over 17 inches long. I found four big coral beads to join the strands together; luckily these had huge holes, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to fit three strands of nylon through them. Finally, I replaced the original gold-plated clasp with a sterling silver one.

This is the result:

As you can see for the last picture, I’ve extended the necklace using 1.2 mm thickness silver jump rings.

I’m pleased with the final result, although I think the necklace is crying out for an enhancer pendant set with turquoise/spiny oyster/pearl, along the lines of pieces by Carolyn Pollack/Relios. It would have to be a HUGE enhancer though. Maybe the charity shop fairy will be kind to me.

An earring to pendant conversion

A while back I found a round post earring in a charity shop. It was a single earring so therefore not the most easy thing to sell on. Also, I don’t wear earrings so if I wanted to actually wear this, I’d have to convert it to something else. So I hit on the idea of turning it into a pendant, like this:

All I had to do was gently bend the post at the back using a pair of chain nose pliers, to form a bale (see below for pic showing the back of the earring). The great thing about this particular pendant is its hidden bale, which means that the pendant doesn’t hang far below the level of the necklace/chain; you can therefore wear it with high-necked tops without worrying whether it’s going to disappear below your neckline. Winner.

This isn’t the only earring to pendant conversion I’ve done in this way – I will dig out the other one and put it on here some time.

Broken amber earring is now… a bracelet

I debated whether or not to turn the broken amber and silver earring into a pendant, but couldn’t find a suitable jump ring (it needed a flattened, oval one rather than a round one IMO). So I hit on the idea of turning it into a bracelet. I had to break off the silver “pad” that would have been opposite the bit of the clip that clamps down on your earlobe. (This needed some care as silver is a soft metal and it was hard to make the pad shear off without distorting the rest of the earring. I just about managed it though.)

Then I filed down the two stumps where the pad had been and where the clip had broken off. I found a fine gauge silver charm bracelet, cut it in half, removed a few of the links on each of the two halves, and inserted the earring in the middle using a couple of small 0.8 mm gauge silver jump rings. Voilà!

Update: the 0.8 mm jump rings turned out to be too flimsy (nearly lost the bracelet while out shopping), so I substituted a pair of 1.0 mm jump rings instead.

Blue John pendant… reborn as a necklace

I bought a small auction lot of pendants recently. One of the pendants consisted of a Blue John stone set in a silver mount. (Blue John is a distinctive purple fluorite stone found in a certain part of Derbyshire, and jewellery made with it is quite sought after.) It was only when I looked closely that I realised the bale was actually broken – someone had crushed it and the top had split. You can just about see this in the photo:

I thought it would be a shame to consign this sweet little pendant to the scrap heap. What’s more, I would like to eventually make a profit out of the items in the lot, so I converted the pendant into a necklace. I cut the bale off, used a file to smooth the place where it had been removed, and then attached some silver chain. And here is the result:

Have now listed it in my Etsy shop. Hopefully soon someone will find that they can’t live without it.

Garnet choker (a tale of two necklaces part 2)

I’ve done something with the two necklaces I described in this post. All the garnets have been pooled together, along with a handful of garnet beads I had left over from an earlier project, to create this choker:

garnetbeadnecklace

The resulting necklace was about 16 inches long (i.e. too short for me) so I extended it a bit with some silver chain. The great thing about this necklace, apart from the lovely texture and colour of the garnets, is that it’s an ideal partner for pendants with a very large bale. The pendant stays put without slipping, and looks better (IMO) than it would on a thin chain.

Here’s me wearing the necklace:

garnetbeadnecklace2

A new take on the button bracelet

This bracelet is something I made a while ago, as an experiment. I had this gorgeous, translucent Art Deco plastic button in a striking shade of cerise, with a gold-painted geometric motif. I wanted to incorporate it into a bracelet, but I couldn’t think how to make it work. Then I hit on an idea – make a button bracelet that only needed one button, and make the button act as fastener and focal point at the same time.

So I got a length of that cord stuff that is used to make piping for cushions, and covered it in black velvet. Then I bent one end back into a loop, and sewed the button at the other end. Bingo. It’s extremely comfortable to wear and can readily be stacked with other bracelets.

velvetbuttonbracelet

velvetbuttonbracelet3

velvetbuttonbracelet2