Fox Brooch Jewellery Project

I've decided to try and blog about my jewellery projects once a month. Not only will it give me something to post about, but having to post about it will keep me making things to post about. I'm hoping it will help to keep the momentum up on both of them.

This month's project is a brooch I made for my grandmother at the beginning of the year. She loves foxes, and I found this little critter on Etsy.



It's quite chunky, so I thought the best thing to go with was a brooch. At first I was going to hang chain from the loops on the pin and dangle leaves like it was hiding among the foliage, but it pretty quickly became obvious this was unworkable. Whatever I hung from the chain would strike the fox, and probably damage it.



So I got rid of the chain. Not damaging the fox was a major consideration here, as was the fact that glass is quite heavy and I wanted to keep the weight of the brooch down or it could damage the clothes it was worn on. Being a hoarder I have lots of leaf charms. Glass ones were out, and the lucite ones were too big. I have several light metal ones, mostly in silver. However I thought the ones pictured above complemented the fox best, as they're quite small and in a sympathetic colour.

Because it was a woodland scene I wanted to add some flowers, and picked some tiny lucite ones because they're light. I went for red to go with the warm colour scheme, and added a silver butterfly for contrast.

And here's the finished piece.

I Love Lucite

I've never been much of a one for flowers, but recently I discovered lucite flowers and now I'm hooked.

There were two sizes available on Beads Direct last time they had a sale - and since the medium ones are an inch across I'd hate to see the size of large ones!

The first thing I made was a bookmark form Mothers Day. I attached a length of chain to the top of the hook, with a leaf at the end and three blue flowers randomly clustered for a naturalistic look.

I also spent some time this weekend making jewellery. There were only two of the medium flowers in white, and they looked really good with small black flower centres, so I paired them up and made a set of earrings. Because the hole runs through the middle the flowers tend to hang straight down, so I added a length of chain to the eye pin loops at the front and back to keep them facing forward.

Also at the weekend, I picked up an elasticated bracelet covered with butterflies. It was horrible, because all the beads were silver and it looked really monochrome. Personally I'd have gone with silver butterflies and brightly-coloured beads. But I already had an idea for the butterflies: to hang one asymmetrically on a necklace, so it formed a part of the chain, then add a dangle of some flowers. So I dismantled the bracelet and did that instead. Then with some smaller lucite flowers, and small butterflies from the same bracelet, made a pair of matching earrings.

 

I quite like making sets, I'm thinking about doing something similar in blue to wear myself.