theclayingmommy: Seahorse Pendant Tutorial...

I've been designing lockets for years now. Sometimes I break a locket because of too much experimenting haha! But the broken ones are too precious for me to just throw in the bin. So I just kept them in my stash of recyclable materials. Now, I found a way to use them again. For this tutorial, I just used one half of the broken locket and I'm still thinking of another design for the other half. I treated it like a bezel and thought of pouring resin inside. So here's how I made the seahorse pendant..

You will be needing the following materials...

half of a broken locket (for this one I used a 2 inch oval locket)

Polymer clay (shades of blue, brown and green)

push mold (for this project I used a Lisa Pavelka border mold)

Lisa Pavelka Magic-Gloss

UV lamp (optional)

Pearl-ex pigment powder Gold

Seahorse Charm

Pasta machine

some of the broken lockets I kept in my stash of recyclable materials

Condition the clays. Run all of your clays through the #3 setting of the pasta machine.

Get your brown clay and then cut it following the shape of the locket (use the locket as your template). Place the cut clay on the bezel side of the locket. Smoothen the sides. Cut the middle part leaving a bit of clay to cover the sides of the inside part. (as shown in photo A)

Get your blue clay and cut a small oval shape that will fit inside the locket. Smoothen the sides. (photo B)

Photo A

photo B

Press the seahorse metal charm into the blue clay. You can use any charms you have, just make sure that they are metal and can be baked together with the clay. (photo c)

Photo C

Now time to make the border. I just used a push mold (photo D) to make it. I just cut the molded clay a bit at the sides so that it will fit the border of the locket. (as shown in photo E)

Fill up the border with the molded clay (photo F). It's up to you what border design you would want to do. You can simply add rolled balls of clay as the border or just add texture to it using stamps/texture tools! :)

photo D

Photo E

Photo F

To add more fun to the border design, let's put small gold balls in the middle of the flowers. (photo G) Made a big difference right? ;) I used balls that are metal also that I can bake with the clay.

photo G

Let's make the border glimmer and shine! Apply pearlEx pigment powder (photo H) to the raised parts of the border (photo I).

To finish the design, let's add some green seaweeds! Get a pinch of your green clay and then flatten it. Add texture to it with your needle tool. Place the seaweeds just like in Photo I.

Photo H

Photo I

Bake your piece in the oven at 275F for 30-40 mins.

After it cools down, it's now time to add the magic-glos. (photo J) I do two applications to prevent bubbles. I use a UV lamp to cure the piece but you can also just leave it under direct sunlight until the gloss hardens.

Make sure that you pop out the gold steel balls and then glue them back again.