At the recent Brisbane Paper Crafts Festival show, I was demoing Friendly Plastic and I promised that I'd make up some of the samples I made into jewellery. So here's the first one: a stretchy bracelet featuring leaves cast from Friendly Plastic Designer Sticks.
Regular readers will recognise the leaves from the tutorial I posted after the show. If you're not familiar with how I created them you can check out the tutorial here or on my website.Because the leaves are cast from Friendly Plastic sticks they are hollow and they needed to be filled with resin before I could drill holes sideways through them. I've strung them on Beadalon Elasticity to make it easy to stretch the bracelet over my knuckles.
Drilling holes sideways was one heck of a challenge because the leaves are quite thin. Try as I might, I just didn't seem to be able to drill straight and I had to top them up with more resin where I'd accidentally drilled through to the back of the leaves. My original plan was to have leaves in graduating sizes but I had to abandon that idea because the small leaves were just too thin to drill. In the end I decided to only use the larger leaf (AM011 Med Leaf) but that meant my bracelet was going to be a little on the short side. So I've added some gold metal spacer beads to make the bracelet large enough to fit around my wrist. You can see them peeking through in this pic.
And from this angle you can even see the resin. If you don't like the resin on the back you could use tacky adhesive and craft foil to cover it, but it's the back of the piece and it won't roll over so it will never be seen.
I rather like the way it's turned out even though it's not what I had in mind originally but my, oh my, it was a difficult piece to put together. I'm hoping the rest of the samples I make up will come together more easily!'Til next time.....
If you can't get enough of My Tutorials and you want even more inspiration, click here to find my books and printable pdfs
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