Personalized Jewelry: Grandma’s Quilt

Many years ago, my sweet, late Aunt Erma, gave to me a very old and tattered quilt. She told me that it was made by my grandmother while pregnant with my father. That would have been in 1930, when my aunt was only 8, a time when women used what they had on hand to quilt with. She pointed to a few of the bright red-checked sections of one of the Dresden plate patterns and told me that was cut from her favorite out-grown dress. The quilt immediately became one of my most precious possessions.Recently, I went about photographing some of the beautiful plate design sections with plans to reproduce them into something special that I could use or display. I rigged my own camera set-up using upside-down stools, books and a modified book rack to hold my camera in the exact same place and distance from each quilt section to photograph.I decided a charm necklace would be a great idea for starters. And for a project like this, PhotoJewelryMaking.com, one of my awesome blog sponsors, has many options for photo frames or bezels to work with. But I’d been wanting to dig into my stash of vintage drapery rings ever since THIS post and thought the quilt images and the rings would be a perfect combination.I cropped the plate images to circles for cutting guides and sized them to fit the 5/8″ brass rings.
I went about creating charms similar to my decal penny project that you can find instructions to HERE.Using Amazing Glaze embossing powder and my little toaster oven I was able to create the quilt charms. When working with Amazing Glaze and paper, there’s a bit of trial and error, especially when your main jewelry piece does not have a backing to catch melting resin. But Amazing Glaze is also quite forgiving and you can usually make corrections by re-heating and re-glazing the same piece. I think my charm necklace turned out pretty sweet.
I made this solitary pendant using a larger brass curtain ring with shabby paint splatters left on it to hold my favorite Dresden plate image that I cut out using my Martha Stewart 1″ scalloped circle punch.
For even MORE fun ideas crafting outside the box, check out my Personalized Jewelry post over on SC Johnson!