Wednesday 10 April 2013

Jewellery Galore!



Hey everyone :) A couple of weeks ago, I re-discovered something from my childhood that I used to love playing with and had completely forgotten about - my 'treasure chest'. It's basically just a tin full up with a load of my Granny's old / broken jewellery and I used to love playing with it and pretending to be a pirate with loads of treasure! 





 As you can see - it was all pretty jumbled up and tangled and a lot of it was broken but because I love making jewellery (especially necklaces) so much, I thought I might make some use out of some of this and see if any of it was salvageable! 

I began by sorting through it and seeing if any of it was use-able as it was, as I couldn't remember for the life of me what sort of stuff was in there:




This meant I could see what I had to work with - the top picture is stuff that was use-able as it was ( 3 bracelets, 1 necklace and 2 brooches) which really wasn't very much and sadly a couple of the bracelets didn't really fit me as I have absolutely tiny wrists! There was a lot of stuff that needed things doing to it- such as having a necklace chain attached so it could be worn as a necklace or having bits taken off it so I could use the chain. There were some bits that really stood out to me:



                         



 The first picture is of what I'm guessing was part of a brooch and I'm hoping to add a necklace chain to it to make it into a necklace. I have no idea what the part in the second picture is from but I absolutely love the little cherubs! Hopefully I'll work out a way to make this into a necklace.... And finally, I think my favourite thing is the little brooch in the third picture that has a blue image of a windmill on - how cute! It doesn't function as a brooch as the little bit at the back that the pin goes into is broken :( so I'm hoping to somehow use it as a pendant for a necklace instead!
After several hours of pulling apart this 'treasure', I was left with VERY sore fingers, a sore cheek where a small piece of metal had backfired straight at me, a very messy room with jump rings and pliers scattered everywhere (I've somehow managed to accumulate 3 different pairs of pliers...) and a load of new jewellery / pieces that I can use to make jewellery!



As you can see this is a big change from what I started with! I think all of this stuff is useable now which is one of the things I love about making jewellery - little trinkets that just lay around and gather dust can be turned into something beautiful that can be used.




I took these little pendants out of a very garish - looking necklace and I'm going to turn them into retro / vintage looking drop earrings! I  haven't been able to do that yet though as I haven't got the right findings for earrings ( you know, the important bit that actually goes in your ear!) so I've ordered some cheap ones from an eBay seller here that should hopefully come soon. I find eBay to be the best place to buy all of these little findings as you can find almost anything and most things are only 99p, compared to jewellery shops that can charge several pounds for them!





This is the little part of a (I'm guessing) brooch that I turned into a pretty necklace! It was so fiddly to make as I wanted to use a fine chain for it so it wasn't too full- on, which meant I had to use tiny jump rings too which are almost impossible to fit into the chain!


After removing some of the quite tacky - looking embellishments from these necklaces, I re-attached all of the chain links together to make these gold chain necklaces! I love chain necklaces and was happy to add these to my ever - growing collection.


 I thought this little crown would make a really cute pendant to go on a necklace so I spent ages removing it from the piece of jewellery it was attached to, only to find that it has this horrible light gold bit stuck in the middle of it! I haven't yet worked out how to remove this bit but hopefully a bit of brute force will do the trick.



The last piece I managed to salvage was this cute little pendanty thing with cherubs on it! I have several of them and want to turn them each into individual necklaces but I haven't yet found a way of attaching jump rings to them (by the way, if you don't already know, jump rings are literally just tiny metal rings that can be opened and closed), so I'm thinking I might need to invest in some really strong super glue to add something on!
Hope you've enjoyed reading about this - I certainly enjoyed doing it! xx 

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