More jewellery - I'm on a roll :) - for Belinda

...and once again, Craftster was the inspiration. I just LOVE that place!!! I've been looking at all the wonderful stencilled t shirts in the image repro section today - oh me oh my (I'm Pinky Pinkerton)- but that's for another day....

So - yes - Craftster - a member called nom_de_plume posted this fabulous cityscape bracelet the other day (she herself had been influenced by the website iloveblocks.com):

And I thought, I gotta do me one of them!

At the same time, I was thinking, what can I make for Belinda - the lovely lady who got us our amazing (and free!) tickets to the Canucks vs Oilers game last month?

Anam put 2 and 2 together and suggested a bracelet for Belinda based on the Edmonton skyline, and we were go go go!!!

Here's a quick how-to:

First I found a suitable photo of Edmonton on the net :


Then I worked out what size I needed it to be in order to create 6 blocks each around 2cm square. As the shrink plastic I was using shrinks by a factor of around 3, I needed to print the panorama out 36cm wide. This is wider than an A4 sheet on landscape setting, so I cut the photo into 2 pieces each 18cm wide.

I printed them out, and cut them into 6 6cm wide sections - and I numbered them to make sure I didn't get them out of order. And then I cut 6 6cm-square pieces of frosted shrink plastic:


The corners of each piece of shrink were rounded, with a corner rounder, it does what it says on the can :) And I cut a template from a post it note, to ensure that I punched the holes for the jumprings in the exact same place on each piece.

The next step was to trace the skyline onto the shrink plastic pieces, I used an ultra fine black sharpie pen:



Then I used Brilliance ink in blue and copper (the Oilers' colours) to colour in each image. I used a cut and dry nib for each colour close to the outline, and a cosmetic sponge for the rest:

Once shrunk, the pieces darken up to a nice dark blue, and rich copper finish:


To add a little more shimmer, I sprayed with a suspension of copper Perfect Pearls (self fixing mica powder) - you can see the flash picking up the mica in a couple of the photos coming up.

Then it was just a case of joining all the pieces together with antique copper jump rings:



and adding a length of chain to each end piece, and a copper toggle clasp (see photo at the top of this post - please do click on that one to see it full size, by the way, it looks naff smallified)

Here is the finished bracelet as modelled by my oldest son (I never realised his hands were so veiny!!)




Chuffed with how this has turned out, I will be making me a Vancouver one next! (and we have a prettier skyline than Edmonton :P)

Edited to add, matching gift box: