The Birth of a Bracelet

Yesterday I made myself a bracelet. Okay...maybe "made" is too big of a word here. Let's just say I "assembled" a bracelet. Or I "created" a bracelet...there, that has a better ring to it...I created a bracelet!

I'm sure I don't have to tell you that bangles are the "it" bracelet this year. All colors and materials work. A whole pile of silver ones that clink around on your wrist are particularly " in."

What to do, though, if you, like me, have a teeny tiny bone structure and bracelets just fall right off you? I lost my first bracelet when I was 9. I remember it had been a gift that a friend of my mom's had bought for me in India, it was made of strands of elephant hair and gold. It seemed the height of exotic to me at the time and I was devasted when suddenly it wasn't there on my wrist anymore.

Since then I guess I haven't grown much proportionally. On those rare occasions when I do find a bracelet that won't fall off, it's still usually so loose that it immediately flips around and whatever charm or decor it has will hang down under my wrist where no one can see it...and gets in the way anything I do with my hands.

So, I decided to take the situation into my own hands, so to speak, and see what I could come up with. Here's the first version of my creation...

 

I took the chain from an old necklace that I never wore (it had a cheap-looking pendant on it) and wrapped it around my wrist. Then I took this four-leaf clover pendant off of another necklace with a fabric string that was frayed and falling apart.

This first system still swung around my wrist too much, though. The pendant slid around to the bottom, so I came up with version two...

Here I ran the chain through the pendant twice and then hooked it into the clasp. It feels better on the wrist and moves around a lot less.

What do you think? Does it work as a bracelet? Have you ever created new jewelry from old pieces?