Spellbinders goes to the Emmy Awards!

Well how exciting is this!  The spellbinders crew are going to the Emmys!  Yes you heard it right!  Stacey along with some of the wonderful designers on the Spellbinders team are going to be walking the red carpet and giving the stars something to remember!  You can check out all about it here

So as part of the celebrations I have created a couple of 'must have' items to literally walk the red carpet in and finish off any beautiful outfit.  I am by no means an experienced jewellery maker in fact I have never made any altered jewellery before, really just strung beads or crystals together into VERY basic earrings or a string of beads type necklace.   All that aside, I still have a little tutorial for you to have a go at altering pieces for your own jewellery making.

I started out by wanting to use one of the beautiful Susan Lenart Kazmar for Spellbinders Bezels as a buckle for a high heel.  So I headed down to our local thrift store for some old shoes perfect for altering.  To my surprise I found a pair that didn't need much more than some dressing up!  I wanted them to have a bit of a glitzy feel so added some Jo Sonja's opal dust to them... it made them so sparkly!

I then took the following Spellbinders products and set about creating.

MMM-001 Spellbinders® Artisan X-plorer™ Machine 

MT1-005 Spellbinders® Media Mixáge™ Texture Plates

MB6-004 Susan Lenart Kazmer™ for Spellbinders® Media Mixáge™ Flowers One Brass Blank

MB6-011 Susan Lenart Kazmer™ for Spellbinders® Media Mixáge™ Birds One Brass Blank

MB1-002 Susan Lenart Kazmer™ for Spellbinders® Media Mixáge™ Squares One Bezel 

I added a beautiful jewellery piece inside the bezel and not much more was needed with that - it looked just how I wanted it to.

Some pearl chain and assorted other chains along with some simply beautiful crystal pieces from Connie Crystal that made the glitzing it up further, just so easy!  I also added some crystals that were left over from my wedding where I beaded lots of crystals onto my flowergirl's dress into the design. I also used the Beadalon  Jump ring mandrel to hold all the pieces together with various sized jump rings from Beadalon silver wire.

As part of the design I really wanted to include my favourite of all the blanks, the birds.  How beautiful are they!  Some time ago I tried adding texture to them with no luck... why... because I was treating them like paper I guess!  Well I have figured out how and I am going to show you how I did it.

First take your Spellbinders Media Mixage Blanks by Susan Lenart Kazmar and sand them to reveal a beautiful shine.  I just used an old fine sanding blog.  In the picture below I have only sanded the right half so that you can see the difference.

Place the bird face down onto the metal embossing plate.  I created my own unique sandwich of Base plate -> Texture plate -> metal blank face down topped with the cutting plate.  All pretending like I was cutting it knowing that the embossing plate never would and I then proceeded to run it through the machine.   

 After it had been through the machine and I turned it over, this is what it looked like.  Don't you just love that texture it suddenly has!

 I loved it SO much I wanted to enhance it more so I set about using a technique John Petersen taught us at the Spellbinders retreat which was to colour up metal using Tsukineko StazOn. Oh how I'm addicted to that technique!!

 Still not wanting to stop there I sanded the StazOn back to reveal the most divine pattern on the bird, perfect for my project.

There are SO many different texture plates that you can really have fun with this technique.  So I hope you give it a try.

The perfect accompaniment to my design - the flowers - came from artist Linda Peterson who a week ago showed us all how to create the most stunning pair of earrings on the Spellbinders Media Mixage Monday Segment - you can check it out here.  The little flower blank she altered and used was going to be perfect.  I don't have any fancy jewellery making tools, but was able to easily take the techniques learnt and create my own take.  

My shoes and handbag really turned out to be the perfect accompaniment to her earrings I thought!  

Here are some detail pics of my altered jewellery making efforts and how all of the above really came together on my project.

Make sure to check out the Spellbinders Blog and Facebook page.  There is so many Emmys inspired projects being shared on both, you are sure not to be disappointed for lack of inspiration.

I hope I have inspired you today to Explore Beyond.