Homemade Christmas: Leather Jewellery

It is almost Christmas. Unbelievable, but so true.
This year I decided to make my Christmas as homemade as possible.
Because I love crafting and doing lots of crafts as decorations and presents
make my day uhmm December. So I try to share one idea for a homemade Christmas with you
as often as possible and hope that you feel inspired, amused or simply festive.
Happy Christmas time to all of you!

I know it is really unbelievable how fast time flies in December. Just another week until Christmas Eve. And how are you doing with presents for your loved ones? I feel quite well-prepared this year – oh well that is not an achievement when you have time off in December ;-), but anyway. I haven’t finished all the shopping and all the crafting, yet, but at least I have ideas for all my loved ones. Because I hate nothing more than running around through shops without having a clue what I want. For me that is just a waste of energy, extremely frustrating and stressful.

Because I want to spare you this situation as well, I today want to share an easy but fancy crafting project with you, which would be a perfect gift for your mama, your sister, your best friend or – like in my case – for my favourite aunt.

I saw a necklace decorated with leather pendants a couple of weeks about at COS. While I loved the style of the necklace and the idea, I wasn’t too fond of the colour and the price tag. Therefore I had a close look and made something very similar myself. It is really easy, not too expensive and something really special, I promise.

All you need is a little piece of leather, a glass, a pen, scissors, a small circular punch, transparent fishing line, some beards (optional) and a fastener.

First I drew as many circles as possible onto my piece of leather. I used a water glass as pattern, but you can use every round object. Just remember the leather pendants on the necklace will be a quarter of the size of the original pattern.

Then you have to cut your circles…

… fold them in half…

… and then in half again, so that you end with a quarter circle.

Then punch a hole into the top corner of the quarter circle (where the two straight edges meet). This is the hardest bit, because punching through four layers of leather requires some ‘oomph’.

After unfolding your leather quarter it should now look like this. A bit like a four-hole button. Then you repeat the same for as many other circles as you want – or have.

Now you just have to bead the folded circles onto fishing line...

... and adding beards is optional. I added some translucent beards to keep the leather pendants apart from each other, but that is really a matter of your own design.

At last you just have to adjust the lengths of your necklace and finish it off with a fastener. I used a magnetic one, because I hate to fumble with the little screwing ones.

Voila, that’s it. It won’t take you more than an hour and you might have a lot of the ‘ingredients’ lying in your craft room anyway. At least if you are as crafting addicted as me ;-)

Happy crafting!