Hi and happy Hump Day!
As promised on Saturday, here are the earrings that I made for the August birthday girls, and also something that started out as earrings but changed halfway through lol. I am happy to report that all the giftee’s have now received their gifts. If you want to see the other posts in the birthday series, click here to see the paintings and here to see the cards.
Recap: I have three friends and a friend’s daughter, who all had birthdays in August so I decided to make life easier for myself and make all four cards and gifts very similar using the same basic supplies and techniques to simplify matters and get them in the mail ASAP. My three friends whose gifts had to be posted, all received a pair of these earrings made from book pages. Back when I used to make more jewellery than anything else, these earrings were very popular among my bookish friends.
I might have got a bit carried away bending these book pages to my will haha. I sprayed them all with coffee I keep in a little spray bottle and then with some Antique Linen Distress Ink.
Then some metallic paint splatters in a couple of different colours and because I didn’t like the size of the gaps between the lines, I stamped over the text with a text stamp. The reason for this madness is because when they are rolled I wanted to see more text and less blank paper.
Then for good measure I added some acrylic paint to some of the pages too.
I rolled up and glued all my little paper beads and then gave them a couple of coats of gloss varnish to make them shiny. So far so good.
And then I got distracted by all the shiny beads and went off on a tangent trying different bead colours and combinations, but I will remember these options for later.
…Though this colour combination is my favourite.
Here’s a look at the three pairs of earrings taken on a towel to try and stop the beads from rolling around and making me crazy.
But wait, weren’t you making four pairs of earrings for four people? Well, yes I did intend to make them all the same, but I started thinking that maybe a teenage girl wouldn’t like this style so I decided to change it up and make something to go with the AIW cards I made, as I definitely know for sure that she loves Alice in Wonderland.
So much for making things easy right? Anyway, here is a little pad of Stamperia AIW paper, and this is the back cover that shows little pictures of the papers inside. They’re very small but actually that makes them perfect for this idea. I have these little cabochon pendant blanks and that tiny Alice and that tiny White Rabbit at the top left of the paper are the perfect size to fit inside!
I made one of each with the intention of turning them into earrings, but then at the last minute I had a thought that they might start to weigh a bit on your ears since the dome part is glass.
Maybe not, since they are quite small, but I decided to switch to making a pendant on a chain instead.
Here’s the finished pendant with the tiny White Rabbit inside. When I told her what I’d done and that I had the spare tiny Alice, she said she would like that one too and is now wearing both of them on the chain together! Teenagers eh?
All the earrings pairs went inside these little kraft pillow boxes with the White Rabbit stamping on them.
So that’s it all done and now I have to start thinking about the dreaded Christmas and what to make. Meanwhile, coming up this week, there are a few fun posts using lots of recycled bits and pieces including some leftovers from these earrings! Tomorrow there’s a cute seahorse tag, on Saturday there is another project coming up for a challenge that you might want to enter as there are always cool prizes, and I might also be able to squeeze in some art journalling if I can get this messy house cleaned up.
As always, thanks for reading!
PROJECT RECIPE:
Book paper
coffee, distress ink, acrylic paint
beads, earwires, eye pins, head pins
kraft pillow boxes
cabochon pendant
AIW scrapbook paper
gel medium
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