A Very Vintage Necklace

Servus, dear crafting friends!
Today I want to share with you an altered art jewelry piece I made:

 

Maybe you already know Retro Kraft Shop, Meresanth's fabulous online store for vintage and steampunk items? I really love the range she offers - especially the watch parts and metal embellishments - but also the range of media she offers is perfect for creating steampunk and/or vintage projects that look heavenly aged and as if they had a story to tell.

I used some of her lovely stuff (watch gears, a watch dial, a vintage button, a metal watch case and some lace ribbon alongside the metal chain) to create a vintage necklace.

I especially love the "damaged" watch dial and the lovely openable watch case which I turned from shiny silver into aged bronze (with a hint of patina) by using Inka Gold guilding pastes which you can also buy at Agnieszka aka Meresanth's Retro Kraft Shop! You will find a short tutorial including a detailed materials list over at the Retro Kraft Shop blog .

The inside of the watch case holds some tiny watch gears and a lovely background paper from the Prima "Cartographer" pad, which is one of my favourites at the moment.

The frozen charlotte was a find at ebay. (I am working on making casts from frozen charlottes using white UTEE at the moment so I won't run out of my real antique ones...maybe I will show you the cast frozen charlottes with a later project...but for now I am still experimenting with my melt pot and the "perfect" cast ;).

The single items were wrapped with black wire and built into loops so I could fix them to the chain with jump rings later. I still have to practice a lot with creating these wire loops and wrappings as you can see... (looking at the photograph while writing this post I find that I forgot to bend in the ends of the wire thoroughly with the vintage button pendant...uh oh...  ;) . The wire was given some dabs with Inka Gold "Brown" guilding paste to soften the dark black colour.

I hope you like my necklace and I really recommend you visit Retro Kraft Shop to see their awesome range of vintage treasures!

Hugs and happy crafting,

Claudia x