Playing With Books contains a project for making beads out of strips of paper. This gave me ideas for other ways of making jewellery out of books, and those led to ideas for using security envelopes. I’ve been working on these for several weeks now, and I’ve finally finished them.

The first was a simple necklace of beads made from book pages. The book I used was the same one I cut up to make the apple and pear. I got a lot of use out of that book!

The words are in Czech, I think. I’m hoping that none of them, having been chopped into sections of words, are now rude words!

The idea for the next one came from all the excess circles I cut for the Dimensional Circle Ornaments. I punched holes in them and glued them together to make a thicker disc, painted the sides silver and then finished with a varnish of gel medium.

I liked this laminating idea, and decided to try it with the security envelopes I’ve been collecting. Not wanting a whole lot of large circles, I decided on squares. There were plenty of different patterns and colours of paper. I chose a selection of blue patterns, cut them into strips, glued them together, cut the strips in half, glued those back to back, cut them into squares, drilled holes and finished with varnish.

I had enough squares to try two different approaches. This one with beads:

Overall, making the paper beads, pendant and tiles took longer than I expected. The beads are particularly fiddly. There’s a lot of drying time involved in laminating. But time wasn’t a factor because I was having fun and making them for me. It would be a different story if I was making them to sell. But I reckon you could develop ways to speed up the process. Perhaps make bigger beads and cut them into shorter pieces. Or laminate together larger pieces of paper then cut them up.

One idea I still want to try is using paper punches that cut out shapes like hearts and leaves and laminate those together. I’ve got some punches on order. And I’d like to try making beads out of the security envelopes, as well as experiment with other kinds of paper. Perhaps magazine pages, or maps.

Plenty of room to explore here. Got any suggestions?

(And in a moment of curious serendipity, I just stumbled on this post about laminated paper jewellery made from books – with the original book as packaging!)