embroidered pendant necklace

 

Admittedly, my embroidery skills are slightly less than on point, but apart from that little foible this darling necklace turned out just as I'd hoped.  A little bit grandma, a little bit spunky.  I used a vintage hankie as my fabric for this, which sounds nice ("vintage" is a good buzz word), but it also provided a simple template to follow with the needle.  I have a bunch of these hankies that are gathering dust anyway, and I liked the flower pattern on this one.  I honestly just didn't trust myself to come up with my own pattern.

This necklace was whipped up in a relative jiffy.  The needlepoint was the most time consuming part, and you're really limited there anyway because of size.  I spent about an hour sewing, and the rest took 20 minutes. 

I followed the hankie's pretty flower pattern with embroidery floss (two strands only) and cut it out in a circle shape with about 1/4-inch+ of extra fabric around the edges of the image.  

I had an antique bronze pendant circle frame that I got from the craft store, but I needed something sturdy and not too thick to wrap my fabric around.  I ended up flexing my super-resourceful muscles and used the plastic base from a reusable grocery tote.  I've used this stuff before to make brims on knit hats, and it works really well.  It's bendable but makes a good form.  I'm sure there's a product out there designed specifically for this type of purpose but this was free.

I cut the plastic stuff into a circle that fit inside the pendant with a thin gap around the edges.  That will allow the fabric to fold around and still fit within the metal frame.

Unfortunately my form is black and my fabric is white.  I didn't want the black to show through, and I also kinda wanted to give it a pincushion look.  So I used a bit of thicker white fabric to stick between the two.  I cut it slightly smaller than the plastic form.

Here's a picture of my assembly line.  I decided to try hot glue, with a Plan B of gorilla glue.  The hot glue worked, so I never had to try Plan B.  I glued the white fabric to the plastic base, then put a drop of glue on top and centered my needlepoint over it.  I flipped it over and carefully pulled it taut around the edges and glued it down.  

The hard apple cider was my helper.

Then I put a glurg of hot glue inside the metal frame and stuck the fabric circle inside. It fit perfectly and so far has stayed put just fine.

Ta-da!

Another shot for art.  Lookit the hankie I destroyed!

And the finished necklace.  I harvested the chain from an old ugly necklace, stuck a few jump rings on one end and a lobster clamp on the other.  And it's beautiful!