Re-worked, Re-vamped, Re-jigged

This is the necklace from the post below. Pulled it all apart and glued the discs together. So now there's six instead of 12. Made a large central disc and dabbed several different colours of rub n buff over a metal washer (to give the whole piece a bit of weight) then covered it with glossy accents and glued it to the disc. Added some beads that I had bought eons ago and it's finished.
More wallpaper. This silver and black wallpaper is my most favourite piece. So much so that I conned Carmen into giving me hers as well. We've both got similar sample books and I put on such a good act about needing it for something special (I used it to cover a journal we were both making in class) that she felt sorry for me and couldn't say no. So the few small pieces I have left are precious......and no Carmen, you're not getting it back.
A mixture of purchased and op shop beads.
I could just cry when I look at these. Decided to have a go at making my own earing wires. So very carefully followed the instructions in one of the books I have and was so pleased with the result. Almost perfect and pretty easy and wow, I'm going to make heaps of these. So after blowing my own trumpet and tooting my own horn and patting myself on the back for making such perfect ear wires I thought I'd better try them on. What......why aren't they going in my ears, what's wrong. Oh for goodness sake, the wire is too thick. Sometimes I'm so silly I scare myself.
So it's back to the drawing board again. I tell ya, my drawing board is awfully full with mess-ups, mistakes and a mish-mash of projects.

Successes and failures

Here's a few things that I've been playing with the last few days. The bracelet below was on op shop find. Bone (I hope it's not ivory....eeek!) rectangle shapes that were strung on hat elastic. I took it apart and cleaned it then stamped a design on the rectangles and added some black beads, they look like swiss cheese and re-threaded it with beading elastic.
Now this one below looks great I think. It's grungeboard discs that I covered with wallpaper. I was lucky enough to have a punch the exact size of the discs which saved a lot of time. Thought I was being smart by just covering the front with wallpaper and painting the back with black then adding eylets and attaching them to the chain. But because the grungeboard is so light the discs twist around with the slightest movement, so it's back to the drawing board. I think I'll glue two discs together so they are the same on the front and the back, but that will reduce the number from 12 to six, so I'll add some other baubley bits and bobs to fill it up.

I know, I know......I said no more green for awhile. But in my defence I had painted and stamped these grungeboard discs prior to my 'ease up on the green' post from a few days ago. Painted them with Golden's Green Gold fluid acrylic and stamped with black and white ink. I love this one, especially the chain.
The silver snail things are Opals, a mixture of Zeehan (silver) and Black.
The other silver circles are from an op shop find necklace.
Once more the green beads on this ring were purchased before my green post. These were fairly quick and simple to do. It's a kit I bought from Wishware beads consisting of the fillagree ring blanks, beads and some wire and it's just a matter of weaving in and out of the ring and threading on beads as you go.
The ring with the read beads is my own design. That one came with a decorated scrabble tile that was supposed to be glued on, but I decided to change it and use some of my own beads instead.
Those wrinkly hands up there are mine. Gosh.....hands really give away your age don't they. Oh well, like the rest of my wrinkles I earned every one.

Stupid Stuff I Do Sometimes

Sometimes I go off and do stupid things and buy stupid stuff but don't realise it's stupid till I get home and try to use it. Case in point is the black chain below. Went to Bunnings because I've been trying, without a great deal of success I might add, to get coloured chain. I should have realised when I saw this chain on a huge roll and the sales girl using some great big chain cutter things to cut it with that it would be completely inapropriate for jewelery. Not only was it too heavy but it was impossible to cut with my normal jewelry tools. Lord...if I had a brain I'd be dangerous.
So anyway, waste not want not I thought, and tried to think of some way to use at least some of the chain (I bought black and white). Then I remembered seeing over at Creative Junkies site a gorgeous jewelry board that she had made awhile ago. Andrea tries to pretend that she's not the least bit arty, farty, crafty but I know different, she's very talented and creative.

Her's is much prettier than mine. I wanted to make it straight away but that meant going through all my scrapbook paper, measuring and cutting and glueing and waiting for things to dry and I was too impatient to wait. Then I remembered I had some 30 cm x 30 cm canvases that I had covered in wallpaper. They used to adorn my family room walls until I replaced them with my own (snicker) artwork (snicker).
Below is the chain, I only had gold coloured push pins so I quickly coloured them with black alcohol ink and pinned the chain to the board. Now I can hang earings from it.
Then I screwed small silver cup hooks across the bottom. I would have preferred black or white ones but Big W has a limited range of hardware stuff and as I said before I was too impatient to wait. Now I can hang some of my chains from them.
When I saw Andrea's post about the one she made I left a comment about being a copycat and that I would hang it next to my faded dusky pink sheets that are masquerading as curtains in my bedroom , which is exactly where it hangs now. (But your not going to see my sheets/curtains, that's for real).
So if anyone has some ideas of what to do with 2 metres of black and white chain, please let me know.
Or if anyone wants to make their own jewelry board and needs chain....... I'm ya girl!

ATC's and some kitsch.

Had a class last night with Kelsey. It was called spotlighting and as the name suggests it's all about highlighting an area of a stamp. We were supposed to do 3 ATC's, two on gloss card and one on cardstock. As usual I only finished one (I'm as slow as a wet week). It's quite an effective technique and the idea is to stamp 2 of the same image, cut out the part or parts you want to highlight from one of the images and leave the background black and white and colour the highlighted part or vice versa. The part of the image that is highlighted is then glued to a black background with a slight border all the way around and raised off the image with foam tape. Photo is a bit blurry but hopefully you get the idea.
I hadn't been to class for a couple of months so it was lovely to catch up with some of the girls namely Svetlana, Charmaine and Nicole......hi girls......waving!

I've been op shopping lately and on the look out for kitchsy jewelery that I can pull apart and re-purpose. Here's my latest stash. I have great plans for these. (I think).

This is a partly re-purposed necklace I made yesterday. The black plastic coated chain was an op shop find but the beads aren't. Wanted to buy some that would co-ordinate with the opals pendant I made that has green, orange, pink and black swirls through it. Sounds quite vile I know but I'm quite pleased with the way it turned out.
And this is just a pretty ordinary pendant that I put together yesterday as well. You might remember this. I had made it into a bracelet but I wasn't happy with the way it sat on the wrist, so I pulled it apart and just added a few beads. It's plain and simple and if I may be so bold as to suggest......classic?
Well I should go and do something constructive I suppose, washing, vacuuming, cleaning cooking, or I could just sit at my desk and play.....mmmm....big decision.