Jeff and I celebrate 20 years of marriage today! It’s been an incredible, incredible ride and we are looking forward to many more wonderful years filled with blessings. We are headed off to the Mendocino, California coast to enjoy a few quiet sunsets over the ocean together.
My most favorite thing to do on a Monday is to go to my good (and local!) friend Selena Cate’s blog to see what awesome things she found over her weekend of thrifting. Thrift Share Monday on her Apron Thrift Girl blog not only shows what and how she found her treasures, but includes links of many of her readers’s finds from the weekend. Selena’s a total pro, and she shares a LOT of great ideas and techniques for finding and making the most out of thrift store, garage sale and estate sale finds.
Saturday, while my daughter Jamie was warming up for her All-Star baseball game in Sebastopol, CA, I took a jaunt over to a fun little thrift store benefiting Hospice. I found this darling little antique cuckoo clock for $3.
It’s missing the pinecone weights, and doesn’t really work, but it was so stinking cute with a mamma bird feeding her babies, I had to bring it home for my studio.
You can enjoy it as well by grabbing my very amature animation for your blog by clicking on the image to access the HTML code for adding it as a blog gadget or into a blog post. Sorry, but with this clock, although it’s always wound, time continues to stand still.
My daughters participate in many fun activities through our church, one of which has been a Thursday morning girls group where each week they gather and a different guest teaches the girls a special skill, while the jr. high boys are off on another activity. The first week the girls learned to sew their own aprons, last week they all made homemade pie, and today was my day to teach a project.
Hartlyn, the jr. high group leader, chose the decal penny pendant from my blog as the project to do and it was a fantastic choice for the girls ages 12-14.
I pre-ordered enough copper ball chain, connector ends and jump rings from the Etsy shop, Cindy’s Art & Soul/casbeads. Cindy put together a custom listing of everything I needed to make up to 20 necklaces.
Instead of hammering a nail into the pennies as before, I lined them up on a block of wood, Lincoln’s head straight up, and duct taped them to the board, (a technique suggested to me by jewelry maker, Julie Ke Banwellund). I used a bit of spray lubricant on each penny and drilled a small hole in each. 
It was good to show up with the pennies ready to craft with rather than having each girl try to punch or drill their own.
I went through the project step by step and then let the girls loose to choose their own vintage decal from my stash and start creating their own pendants with the embossing powder.
One by one I helped them bake the powder to the pennies in the toaster oven, while another mom helped with jumprings and chains.
The finished pieces all turned out fantastic! We did have two that didn’t quite work out well the first time around, so it was good I had extra pennies and decals. Here are the sweet results!
For more details on how to make these decal penny pendants, click HERE.
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Tagged calvary chapel petaluma, meyercord decals, penny jewelry, vintage decals
