Year In Review ~ Jewelry

Jan 5, 2012

I had lots of fun cre­at­ing neck­laces and bracelets using bro­ken pieces of jew­elry found at flea mar­kets or thrift stores. One of my favorite things to make are bracelets using vin­tage ear­rings. The hard­est part is find­ing ear­rings at a rea­son­able price. It is always so fun when I stum­ble upon a pair dur­ing my trav­els and thrift­ing. For Christ­mas I made my niece Amanda and me match­ing bracelets. She pur­chased three pairs the two blue ones and the rhine­stone shell look­ing one in the cen­ter. Then I scoured antique stores from Texas to West Vir­ginia as well as Flea Mar­kets in McK­in­ney and Win­nie, Texas to Antique stores in Frisco, Beau­mont, Lum­ber­ton and Sour Lake, Texas. Finally, I gath­ered enough for us to have match­ing bracelets. I stamped XOXO on a small sil­ver charm since that is what we have told each other since the day she has been old enough to talk or type.

I also had fun mak­ing the neck­lace out of a Stan­ley Ruler my dad found. I added baubles and vin­tage rosary beads and had this fin­ished in no time flat. The longest part was allow­ing the rhine­stones to dry on top of the ruler sections.

I also enjoyed cre­at­ing unique charms for my neck­laces. All I did was attach vin­tage but­tons onto a bail using E6000. Super sim­ple and super pretty. This charm is so pretty hang­ing off of my vin­tage pearl neck­lace I found for a cheap $5.00 when dri­ving through Ken­tucky, this past summer.

And I need to tell you about a young lady who just opened her own Etsy store. Her name is Annie Pitts. Her Etsy store Ooga Hand­made can be found HERE. I’m always excited to intro­duce a bud­ding entre­pre­neur and when they have tal­ent like Annie it’s super excit­ing. Her bead place­ment and color com­bi­na­tions are awe­some. And I see she has match­ing ear­ring and neck­lace sets too. I expect to see some of her cre­ations in Bead Trends in the future.

Hugs!