Great Idea...Just Not Mine

Again....I wish I had thought of this but the next best thing is I can take this creative person's idea and make it my own.  For Christmas my daughter-in-law gave me the cutest piece of silver that she found in a local antique shop.  Someone had a great idea of a trinket for the house or the Christmas tree or wherever, they took a piece of old silver flatware, cut off the bowl and made this great piece from the stem.

I've used it for a book mark, hung it from a candle, used it on the Christmas tree in place of ice icicles.  Really, there are so many things you could use this for.

Since I'm in a snow mood, its the middle of February and we here in western Michigan have no snow I decided to make a few of these and add a silver snowflake to them.

 

I used a small snowflake on this one, and some larger snowflakes on others.  This was a very simple project and making five of them took me about half an hour to complete.  I'm having issues finding flatware at GW and SA right now, I guess someone must have beat me there but what I did find I only paid nineteen cents for each piece.  The total cost for this project is about fifty cents per piece.

Here's how I did it.

I put each piece of flatware in the vice and used a hack saw to remove the bowl from the stem.  If you have a Dremel tool I think you could do this a lot easier but really the hack saw worked fine, it took me about thirty seconds to saw through each piece, just depends on the quality of the silver and how thick it is.

I have no idea what I'm going to do with the bowls from this project but I'll keep them for another day.  Some cleaver person will come up with a great project that I can copy using leftover silver pieces.  Its only a matter of time.

Next I used a very small metal drill bit to drill a hole in the center of the stem.  I'm done apologizing for my poor photo skills, I don't even know how to turn off the flash so what you see is what you get.

When I first tried this the drill bounced a little and the hole was off center, I found that if you scored it with a hammer and nail just making a little indent in the silver, then drilled from the back of the piece you can control the drill bit much better.

 I'm fortunate to have a drill press that made this project much easier.  This sanding drum took all the metal burrs off where I had cut the silver and drilled the hole.  You can sand by hand but if you have a drill press or an electric sander this will go much faster.  After all the burrs are gone you can start embellishing your silver pieces.

I used a very thin elongated needle to thread all the pieces starting with the ribbon.  I cut about twenty four inches of fine ribbon, you could also using cording or whatever else you might have around.  It just needs to be pretty thin.

The original piece had a silver button for embellishment, I found these at Hobby Lobby. I also added the silver snowflake so that was threaded on to the ribbon first and then the silver button.  I tied a knot just above the silver button just to keep it and the snowflake in place.  Then I tied a knot at the other end and that was it my friends.

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