DIY: Floating Necklace

You know what I love? Jewelry. You know what I hate? Spending money on it. Does anyone like spending $20+ on a necklace when the materials to make it cost a fraction of that? I don't. So, as a beginner jewelry maker, I decided to take on this seemingly simple project: a floating necklace. 

I bought a necklace like this a few years ago, because I liked how delicate it looked. I bought larger beads than the ones in my purchased necklace, because I wanted to play around with the look a little. This is how I duplicated one of my favorite pieces of jewelry. Oh, and I apologize for the quality of the above photo! It came out really grainy.

Materials:

• jewelry board
• bead stringing wire
• 18 beads (I used glass pearls, which you can purchase at any craft store)
• 36 #1 crimp tubes
• 2 #3 crimp beads
• 1 clasp
• flat jewelry pliers
• crimping tool

How to:

• Cut 3 pieces of stringing wire: a 25 inch piece, a 23.5 inch piece, and a 22 inch piece.
• Lay the 25 inch piece of wire in one of the jewelry board channels.
• Thread a crimp tube, a bead, and another tube onto the wire. Repeat this process 6 more times, so you have tube, bead, tube, tube, bead, tube, etc. You should have a total of 7 beads and 14 crimp tubes on your 25 inch piece of wire when you're done.
• Center the 4th bead at position '0' on the jewelry board. 
• Using your flat jewelry pliers, crimp the tubes on either side of the center bead, securing it in place.
• Spread the remaining 6 beads evenly on each side, and crimp the tubes as you did for the center bead.

• Lay the 23.5 inch beading wire in the next board channel.
• Thread 6 beads and 12 crimp tubes onto this wire, as you did previously (tube, bead, tube, tube, bead, tube, etc.).
• Position the beads in the spaces between those on the 25 inch piece of wire so they are staggered relative to the beads on the first strand. Crimp the tubes to secure the beads in place.
• Lay the 22 inch beading wire in the final board channel. 
• Thread 5 beads and 10 crimp tubes onto the wire as done previously.
• Line these beads up with those on the 25 inch wire, and secure by crimping the tubes.

• Hold the three ends of one side of the necklace and thread them through a #3 crimp bead.
• Then, thread the ends through the loop of the clasp and back through the crimp bead to attach the clasp to the necklace.
• Using your crimping tool, crimp the crimp #3 bead. Trim excess wire.
• Repeat these steps on the other side to attach the other piece of the clasp.

And that is how you make a floating necklace! If you look closely, you can see that I used 12 large glass pearls and 6 medium-sized glass pearls. The 6 smaller ones were used as the top beads on each side of each strand. You can, of course, adjust the number of beads and/or length of the necklace to your liking.

DIY: Fabric Flowers

Jake and I bought our first house about 7 months ago out in the burbs. Prior to moving out here, I had lived in Baltimore city for 6 years. 6 YEARS. What's not to love about living in a city? There's almost every type of ethnic food within a 10 minute walk, you can find sweet happy hour deals EVERYWHERE (and any day of the week, for that matter), and you don't have to drive anywhere. The number of bars in a one block radius alone makes city-living an ideal way of life for a twenty-something young professional and/or graduate student.

There are certain things that make city-living awful as well. Parking is an absolute nightmare - especially when you just get back from the grocery store, Baltimore rats are so huge I mistook them for cats when I first moved here (true story), and the garbage smell on Tuesday mornings in Fells Point alone was enough to make me get a gym membership (have you ever tried going for a run at a garbage dump? Because that's what Bmore smells like around 6am the morning of trash pick-up). My love affair with my seemingly perfect city life waned over time, and Jake and I decided it was time to 'settle down' and buy a house together. You know, the whole big back yard, white picket fence sort of place where we could begin married life together. So that's what we did.

We've been here 7 months, and we're still unpacking and getting settled. We haven't hung curtains in every room, and we're still painting. The inside of our place is in disarray; however, from the outside, our place looks pretty sharp! Jake takes care of our lawn, and our house has been recently painted. I decided one thing our house really needed was a big old wreath on our front door. Isn't that, like, a rule? All front doors should have a wreath on them? 

I stopped by my local craft store the other day and bought an 18 inch grapevine wreath and some fake flowers. Then I had the brilliant idea to MAKE my own fabric flowers. It would certainly be less expensive than buying all fake flowers. So I did some research and found this tutorial. Her step-by-step instructions are great, and I posted pictures right from her website, rather than ones from my own attempt.

Materials:

• a T-shirt in any color you want
• some felt in a complementing color
• scissors
• paper (to make a template)
• pins
• hot glue gun (or tacky glue)

How to:

• Draw a flower on your paper to make a template. The flower should have 5-6 petals and doesn't have to be precise. I made two templates - one that had 5 petals and one that had 6 petals. Each flower was 3-3.5 inches across.
• Cut out the flower and pin it to your T-shirt (see picture below from the website I used as a reference). Using this as a template, cut 9 fabric flowers.

• Take your felt and cut a circle approx. 2.5 inches across.
• Take 1 fabric flower and fold it in half. Then, fold it in half again so you form a right angle. Do this with 4 of your fabric flowers. 
• Arrange your fabric flowers in a circular pattern on your felt circle as demonstrated in the photo below. Glue each folded fabric flower to the felt.

• Then, glue each folded flap to itself (see picture for clarification). Do this with each adjacent flap.

• Now, you're going to repeat this process with four more of your fabric flowers. Fold four more fabric flowers in the same fashion as above. But, instead of layering them directly on top of the ones you've already glued to the felt, you're going to lay them in a perpendicular fashion so your final flower will have lots of volume. The picture below should clarify things:

• Glue four of your folded fabric flowers in this fashion, and glue the flaps to each other as you did previously. Fluff up your glued flaps, and to add more volume, glue more flaps to one another. Your flower should look something like this:

• Take your remaining fabric flower and fold it in half only once. Then, sort of roll it up into a cone so it creates a rosebud looking piece of fabric (see below).

• Cut off the bottom 1/2 inch of fabric (the bottom of the cone), and hot glue the bottom of the cone to the center of the layered fabric flower you've created. Glue the fabric flaps to the center cone to give your flower more volume. 

Here is my finished product. I used an old white T-shirt that I pulled out of my 'clothes to donate' bag. Holler for up-cycling! I made three of these, which I then decided to use on my wreath.

This little project came together very quickly, and now our house has a beautiful wreath on the front door. Here's a close up of the wreath detail. You can purchase the fake flowers and grapevine wreath at any craft store. To assemble, just hot glue the flowers (fabric or purchased fake ones) to the wreath.

I'd love to hear how your fabric flowers turn out, and what you decided to do with the ones you made. You can use these flowers for anything from wreaths to headbands to hair clips to pins. Leave some comments and let me know how you used yours!