Monday, September 12, 2011

Scrabble Tile Jewelry

I was scheming away the other night, trying to figure out how I could make some more jewelry to wear for Halloween, since I don't have the cash to buy any. I was thinking about my inventory of junk jewelry and nothing seemed right. I thought even if it was super simple, like saying "boo" it would work. Voila! Inspiration hit me, I have a whole bunch of scrabble tiles that I've bought for scrapbooking and crafts. Why not drill holes into them and make jewelry?? Here's what I came up with:
You can pick up scrabble tiles pretty inexpensively on eBay but I love finding them at garage sales and thrift stores. I used a small drill and an old scrap piece of wood to do my drilling. You have to be careful with the drilling, if you drill too close to the tile's edge it will break or be too weak to use with jump rings. If you drill too far in, it makes it really difficult to use the jump rings. Good luck with that. The other thing that tripped me up was that I wasn't paying attention to which tiles I was drilling and I accidentally drilled holes at the top of the "I" and "R" in Girl. I suppose I could have added charms or something, but I just switched them out, they are pretty common letters in the scrabble sets. I started with the "Boo" earrings for Halloween, then I thought it would be fun to make a necklace for my daughter for homecoming. Our town's colors are purple and gold and our team is the Arrows. It was pretty simple from there. My husband suggested making a bracelet in case my not-girly daughter wouldn't wear the necklace. So I tried using the gold thread to link the letters, then used the jump rings to attach the word to the purple cording. I don't like it as much as the necklace but my 4 year old loves it. I think I'll make a necklace for myself too. The last project I made today with the tiles was a Girl Scouts bracelet. I thought maybe it would look nicer and be more flexible if I used a 3-ring combination to connect each tile. I got the whole thing done and realized that it wasn't as strong as the large jump ring style because now there were 3 weak points instead of just one. So I took it apart and switched it to the larger jump rings. It turned out better, and I think it will be pretty strong