Evening Everyone
Its been a busy day for me today, after the usual house stuff I sat down and spent the whole afternoon crafting. I am going to spilt this over the next 3 blogs as I took plenty of photos to show the steps that were taken, hopefully allowing you to make your own version.
The first thing I wanted to do was create a "nappy pin" for a nappy style card, I wanted to put something together that was a gift aswell as a card, a keepsake if you like.
Nappy pins are fairly small so I substituted this with a kilt pin;
The girl that is having the baby loves sparkles and since I have decided not to use them on the card, I am going to use plenty as charms.
The first thing I did was make the "new baby" charms, these were made up of coloured acrylic letters place on head pins which were then trimmed with cutters and the ends turned into loops using round nosed pliers;
I also made up the sparkle dangles in the same way, threading the glass beads onto the head pins and then putting loops on the end;
Next I picked some lovely silver coloured metal charms and added jump rings to them so they were also ready to attach, always split the rings by twisting rather than pulling the end apart and mishapping the circle;
I also wanted to add a little personal touch and so I thought about making a couple of shrink plastic charms, this is shrink plastic and it can be found relatively cheaply in any art store or online;
To use this you simply draw your design on the piece of shrink plastic using a permanent ink so that once finished it will not run if it gets wet, I use Promarkers for the outside lines and also for colouring. Please remember at this stage to punch a hole in the design so that you can attach your jump ring after shrinking;
You can then at this point either use your oven or a heat tool to shrink the plastic, it does some crazy shrinking but I hold it in place with a tooth pick, don't be alarmed by the way it curls up etc, once it has finished shrinking it goes perfectly flat again, at this point you then take it out from under the oven or turn off the heat tool, this is what a heat tool looks like;
The charms after shrinking and with the jump rings attached, they are much thicker and more like a proper charm;
So that's all the charms sorted. At this stage I got some silver plated chain and started to attach all the charms with jump rings, it is always good to have a selection of different sized rings as all charms and chains are different.
This is the finished pin, all ready to be attached to the card and hopefully mum-to-be will love it!!
Come back tomorrow to see the card that this has been made for.
Sweetdreams Crafters,
Amanda xx
