A Charmed Life Guest Blogger Eileen Bellomo

6/21/2009 06:54:00 PM / Posted by Heidi Bound / comments (7)


I am honored and proud to present my very first Guest Blogger for Heidi's Crafting Mecca, Eileen Bellomo. Eileen is a dear friend and member of the Gotham City Stampers Demonstrator Team. She is also a well respected artist who is growing more and more popular in the papercrafting circuit. Eileen does amazing work and loves to make jewelry from paper products. Check out her post on charms and please feel free to leave a comment. Need more of Eileen and her creative art? Check out her blog!

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A Charmed Life
I wouldn’t exactly say I’ve led a charmed life; I’ve had my ups and downs. But I do like having some charms in my life….the kind I can make myself, that is.

This is one of the easiest charms to make. Flatten a bottle cap (use a hammer if you must, but running one through your Big Shot or Cuttlebug works like a charm (oh, so sorry about that!) Attach a piece of clipart (a 1” circle punch works perfectly for this), cover with a layer of a glossy medium and add some easy bead dangles if you like. The Crop-O-Dile punches holes easily, but a large nail and a hammer will work if you’re not a tool collector like I am.


Tim Holtz has a line of embellishments called Fragment Charms, little acrylic shapes with pre-drilled holes. You can color them with alcohol inks, stamp and emboss them. In this one I stamped flowers with Stazon, sprinkled with glitter and heat set.

Another easy way to make a charm is to use some sort of charm blank. This one is called a Memory Frame. You simply insert your art between two pieces of glass (cut to fit the size of the frame), put it all in, snap the frame closed and voila! Instant jewelry. You can’t see them in these pictures, but there are bead dangles hanging from the bottom loops.

This is another example of using a charm blank. In this one, I had a tiny mah jongg tile that fit exactly into the blank (dumb luck!). I just glued it on and then added the bead dangles.




These last two are about as low-tech as you can get. I applied the images (BTW, all the images featured on this post are from my favorite company, Paper Imagery Designs) to 1” squares of chipboard, then covered them with Versamark and clear embossing powder and heat set. I pressed the edges into more Versamark and then gold embossing powder. Again, my Crop-O-Dile punched through the chipboard in a snap. I added a tiny charm to the jump ring on this one instead of adding a dangle to the bottom.
So, now that you see how easy it is to have a charmed life, why don’t you go make some charms!

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