North Woods Kitsch

I saw a really wonderful necklace last winter when I was visiting Cape Town at Mungo and Jemima on Long Street. The designer was a woman in the UK, and I would post her info here if I could remember what it was, but I can't.

The necklace was a deer's head woven out of seed beads. I really wanted to buy it, but when I did the calculation from Rand to US $ I realized it was $200! Seed beads? $200? I could make that for about $2, I thought. Well, I eventually did, but it took about a year, and the longer the project lingered on my desk, the more reasonable $200 started to seem.

However, if you are up for a time-consuming sort of craft project (i.e. if you think knitting is an OK pursuit) this is a way to make an expensive looking accessory for very little money. I wore it to a party yesterday and lots of people seemed to think it was awesome. (Disclaimer: my partner thinks this is the ugliest thing ever, but what the heck?)



you will need

tracing paper
colored pencils
photo or print out of image you want on the necklace
thread or nymo
seed beads (all the same size/shape - flat edged are best)
beading needles
wax (optional)
beading frame (or box - although I recommend making a frame)

how to do it

First, you need to make a design. All the necklaces I saw like this were essentially Y shapes -- deer with antlers, birds with wings up, things like that -- or round shapes like flowers. I loved the deer, so I did my own version of that.

Sizing the design was the biggest issue. I wasn't sure how many beads across and down equaled an inch square once the thread spaced out the beads. It turned out that 15 beads across = 1 inch, and 10 beads up and down = 1 inch.

1. Draw a grid onto a piece of tracing paper. The grid should be composed of rectangles, not squares, to account for the difference in number of beads side to side versus up and down.

2. Find a photograph somewhere (pictures of animals on Flickr abound).

3. Decide how big you want your necklace to be (say, 2 inches high), go to your tracing paper and (using the example of my gauge of 15 x 10) count out 30 rectangles up and down on your grid and measure that distance.

4. Re-size the photograph in a photo editing program so that the animal is the height you just measured.

5. Print out your photograph.

6. Decide on the number of colors of beads you intend to use. I only had a certain number of small flat edged seed beads, so I used those. Pick out the same number of colored pencils that roughly match the beads in value and color.

7. Tape your tracing-paper grid over the photograph, and color in each rectangle with the closest color of color pencil. Hue doesn't matter as much as value. For instance I used navy blue for black and pink for tan on my deer.

8. Take the tracing paper off the photo and gaze at what you have done. Does it look like the animal? If yes, proceed. If no, maybe you need a more iconic or more contrasty photograph.

9. Here comes the fun part. Time to make the loom. First, count how many columns of beads across you've got on your image. You'll need that many warp threads plus two.

10. Find something that can act as a frame. I used an old 4x5 film box, but I would not recommend following my example. It will work better if a) it doesn't bend at all and b) it doesn't have a bottom like a box, but instead is really just a frame. Hammering together 4 pieces of molding into a small frame would do nicely.

11. Wrap your thread tightly around the frame enough times to make the number of warp threads you counted in step 9.



12. Thread a beading needle with thread, tie that thread to one of the middle warp threads. You're going to start in the middle and work out to one side first, because that leaves the hanging tail of thread in a better spot.

13. I followed this tutorial to get started: http://www.beadiefriends.com/LoomworkInstructions.htm



14. Now you just bead like crazy until you're done, following your pattern. Here are some pitfalls I encountered:

• My warp thread was too thick, so when I got done I had to finish the edges with glue because I couldn't weave my ends back through the beads. Use the same narrow thread you use for the weft. You should be able to pass at least three strands of thread through the hole on one bead.
  
• I kept forgetting to start new threads in the middle of the row. Knots on the outside look ugly.
• My frame bent because it was made out of cardboard and the warp threads got loose. Use wood or a real bead frame.

15. Take it off the loom, weave in your ends or make beads of glue to keep the ends from slipping through the beads. Trim your threads to the finished piece.

16. Sew chain to the back and attach a clasp to the ends of the chain.

WOO! That took for freaking ever!

Wanna buy a watch?

Here are a few more of these things. I'm thinking of hawking them around to some of the stores in my neighborhood, since Etsy is not producing results.

Wristwatch Shadowbox Jewelry

About 10 years ago I bought two antiquey women's wristwatches from an estate sale. Somehow I thought that I, with no knowledge of clocks or any particular skill at mechanical engineering, could make them work again. Obviously, this did not happen. What happened instead was that I moved the broken watches from box to box each time I reorganized my jewerly making supplies. Suddenly last month I had a brainwave -- I realized that what I like about the watches is their cases, which are ornate gold plate. Without the works inside, watches make neat little shadow boxes. You can put whatever you want inside and hang them from ribbons or chain.

Conceptually, this is fairly simple and doesn't really need step by step directions. Instead, here are some tips to make it easier:

1. Opening the case can be pretty difficult, particularly with newer watches. Usually one place on the back has a divot where watch repairers presumably insert some specially made tool to open the watch. The divot will be on one of the areas that faces the band. Since I don't have whatever this tool is, I've used x-acto knifes (prepare to brake your blade), eyeglass screwdrivers, and a flat hard piece of brass that used to be attached to a key. None of these are ideal. Try not to stab yourself in the hand.

2. A certain style of woman's watch attaches to the band at only one point on either side. These are the best candidates for hanging from a chain.

3. Newer watches or men's watches usually have pins that attach the band. Take off the band but don't lose the pins. Put them back and use them to help attach a ribbon or chain to the watch.

4. Beads are tempting to use as filling for your newly created shadow box. Pearls look nice because they catch light and reflect it back in multiple directions, making them easier to see. Here are some other ideas:

• tiny quartz crystals
• "micro beads" which are extremely small glass spheres that don't have holes in them. Apparently micro beads are used for decorative craft projects where you mix them into paint or glue. You can buy them here
• Undrilled semiprecious spheres. You can get these here
• Bits of the watch works (i.e. tiny gears, springs, etc.)
• Acrylic spheres. Mine came from T&T Plasticland, which is basically just an awesome place you should check out.
• seeds

My first two watch necklaces were very Victorian looking. I made one for me and one for Sweet Tea:



Now I'm working on one made from an old Timex that used to belong to my dad. This seemed not so great hanging from a chain, so I used grograin ribbon instead. I'm not sure what style this is - punk preppy?



You can see more of these at my shop on Etsy.

dressmaker's pin earrings

I've always loved fancy sewing pins. They look so satisfying in the pin cushion, just like candy sprinkles. This morning I realized they could make cute earrings. This project takes about 2 minutes and costs almost nothing.

You will need:
Small pliers
Wire cutters
2 dressmaker's pins

How to do it:
Snip the sharp ends off the pins. Leave as much length on the shaft as possible. Bend the shaft around to form the earring wire.

And you're done!

Buttons, wire, ribbon, and chain — what can I make this morning out of stuff I have lying around the house?

I was perusing expensive catalogs the other day when my attention was caught by a necklace made from what looked like large plastic chain links and vintage buttons. Now I didn’t have any plastic chain, but I had just about all the other components I thought I needed. The free craft project! Free, at least, in that I completely forgotten when I got the button, wire, ribbon and chain I planned to use.

Here's the original necklace, which I saw in Anthropologie's catalog:

[hmm . . . apparently flickr yanked that image, but my necklace is cooler anyway. hey, anthropologie, you didn't want me doing free advertising for you? stupid you.] --revised 3/12/2010

To make my version, here's what you'll need:
pliers
wire cutters
a sewing machine, or a needle and thread
chain with larger links
ribbon
buttons and beads
seed beads

Here's how to do it:
For the part of the necklace that requires links, I decided to use part of an old wallet chain - the kind that lets you attach your wallet to your belt. In 1994 we thought these chains made us look like toughs, but it’s not 1994 anymore, thank god. I had one I would never wear again, so I took out a link and used half for this project.



Buttons I have galore.



Some are from my mom’s old stash, some are from an awesome fabric store on the south side of Chicago. I thought at first that the best kind of button would be the kind with a central metal post, basically a bead with a loop on the back. I didn’t have all that many of that shape, so I also got out a plastic necklace I had broken the other day, and mined some beads from there.



As I started putting beads on the chain, I realized that a mixture of bead-like buttons and larger flat buttons (the kind for a winter coat) actually made a more pleasing cluster on the chain.



Flat buttons can be attached to the chain with a single jump ring (I used cheap non-silver ones, since the chain isn’t silver anyway). Bead buttons also take a single ring.



Actual beads need a wire wrap (or earring pins would work really well, but I didn’t have any). I put a seed bead in a loop of wire to hold the bottom of the bead, wrapped a loop at the top, and then attached that to the chain with a jump ring.







This process took a lot more beads and buttons that I had originally planned on.



For the part that goes around your neck I used wide ribbon. Lots of different kinds would work for this. The best color I had was in the form of enormous rick-rack.



First you pull the ribbon through the end of the last chain loop, fold it over and sew it down. Then hold the necklace up to your neck, look at how long you want it to be, and mark the ribbon at the center of the back of your neck. Cut it about an inch past the mark, fold it under and sew. Do the same on the other side, but make that piece longer - you want it to overlap the first piece by about an inch.



Now, find a nice small button you want to see holding the necklace closed. Make a button hole near the end of the longer ribbon. Sew your button to the end of the shorter one.



(I made a pretty half-assed button hole. If you want to see how to do it correctly, look here: http://www.purlbee.com/buttonhole-tutorial/)

Finished!



Now I think I’m going to do one with felt beads from Chinatown . . . .