Fairy Tale Charms

It’s that time again — time to turn in my charms to my Charm Exchange Group.

There are a lot of charm exchange groups on Yahoo. The one I belong to is mostly about altered art, which means taking something and turning it into something it wasn’t meant to be, but rather, something artistic. I joined the group to help me work outside my normal comfort and skill level, and it’s been a lot of fun and a definite learning experience.

So here I am, getting ready to make 15 charms to send in. I decided to start out with a Scrabble game tile. I sanded the blank side so glue would stick better, and then looked through the loads and loads of decorative papers I have in my studio (I used to make greeting cards as a job before it was all about jewelry, so, lots o’ paper).

I found a romantic, muted paper with gold glitter that reminded me of old tapestries, and I thought of old castles. So I decided that the theme of the charms would be “Fairy Tales”.

Since Scrabble tiles are small, using a paper cutter isn’t practical. So using a pencil and a ruler, I traced around each tile, first finding a pretty spot on the paper (lots of glitter, not too dark, neat pattern, etc). I then had to trim each bit of paper to size, freehand. Here’s what the leftover paper ended up looking like when I was done:

Lots of cutting, trimming, tossing out.

The bits of paper were then glued to the Scrabble tiles and coated with Modge Podge several times for a gloss. I drilled a hole through the top, inserted two bronze rings, added a deep red Swarovski crystal, and side one was done:

Now for the second side! I decided to take the letter on the Scrabble tile and associate it with a word that had a pleasant meaning — something enlightening, fun, motivating — you get the idea. I had an old, old fairy tale book and I started flipping through it to find words. This was much harder than it sounds. I got through the entire book and was still missing ONE word for the letter”O”. A much slower read later (and this was a thick book), I finally got all the words cut out.

So here’s the second side, with words glued and glazed on:

I wish that some of the words didn’t overlap the letter, but there was nothing I could do about it, as I didn’t have any more vintage books with smaller letters. Lesson learned — some letters on the tiles are wider than others — especially the “M”!

Now, on to packaging. Part of the rules of the Charm Exchange Group is to package them in a pretty way. I cut out squares of fairy-tale-esque paper:

and then wrote up a bit about the inspiration for the charms on ivory paper, set the two together with gold eyelets, and tied the charms to the cards with burgundy thread.

And there you have it! A piece of jewelry totally outside my normal parameter, using methods I wouldn’t ordinarily have though of. What do you think?

Lori Anderson designs and blogs from her studio in Easton, MD. You can buy her work at her website, Etsy, and craft shows, and read more about her at her blog.