Jewellery Bashing

In the old Star Wars movies several props were made by taking model kits of aeroplanes, cars and the like and cutting them all up and re-assembling them to create fantastic spacey-looking things. One example of this is the trench in the Death Star run in Episode IV. Anyway, I won't start on that but I'll just point out that the model kit re-assembly process is referred to as 'kit bashing'.

Why am I talking about this?

Well, sometimes when I'm out and about shopping I quite often see cheap and nasty jewellery that occasionally contains interesting-looking components. The jewellery itself is tat - base metal and usually very poorly put together (don't I sound like a snob?!) but bits of it are pretty nonetheless.

I wanted to make some earrings to wear to this shinding tonight. My shoes and bag are pale gold but I couldn't find any nice gold jewellery. So I took these crystal links out of a cheap pair of earrings that I bought, some glass drops from another pair, re-wired everything on sterling as I'm allergic to gold and threw in some Swarovskis for good measure! Ta da! New earrings.

So for all you jewellery designers out there who don't do 'jewellery bashing' as I call it, you should give it a go. It's fun!