Patchwork - How to Make Your Own My Pretty Vegas Show Pony Necklace

Patchwork in crafts can come in many shapes and forms. The first thing that comes to mind is quilting. I remember when I was a teenager my friend Becky’s mom made her a crazy quilt for her bed out of all these vintage fabric scraps she had. Becky secretly hated it, but I loved it. All I knew in the world of quilts were the family quilts my mother had lining the upstairs halls of her Victorian home. Lots of flowers, pastels and girls in bonnets. Becky’s quilt was wild, colorful and well as the name implies crazy. I’m leaning towards scoring any number of the vintage quilts currently listed on Ebay.

When I see handspun multi-colored yarn, it’s enough to make me want to learn to knit. Venus Art is here in Austin and every time I am in Craft-o-Rama I eyeball her delicious yarn. The other yarn is by Folktale Fibers and is equally fabulous. Another idea for us non-knitters is to wrap a bracelet with it. There is an easy how-to at Craft Stylish with all the instructions.


My favorite patchwork craft is collage. I love getting my fingers covered in Decoupage and sorting through fun papers to make jewelry. Some of my favorite papers to use are by Traci Bautista who has a very cool graffiti chic style. They are perfect for my jewelry and Traci keeps me well stocked on all her goodies. I even used her papers for a project in my book! I am so excited to also tell you that Traci has her own line of Decoupage called Collage Pauge coming out through Aleene’s this summer! You can already snag some at JoAnn's and pretty soon I'll be able to wave to Traci at Hobby Lobby too! Shiny, matte or glittery – whoo-hoo! I can’t wait to play with some at CHA this summer!


Recently a fun craft company called Decopatch contacted me and asked if I was interested in trying out their product. Me say no to free craft supplies, ya you know me better than that. They sent over a stack of their fun papers and two little ponies for me to get crazy with. My first thought was that I was going to make bookends. I had seen the cutest pair of patchwork squirrels at Rose and Radish, but then I thought better of it.

I asked Hope “do you think this is horse, is too big for a necklace?” she of course being a blood relative and one with very similar taste in giant tack-a-liscious jewelry said “no it would make an awesome necklace”. So let it be written, so let it be done.

The first thing I did was to tear the tissue thin paper into little arbitrary strips. Sure I could have used scissors, but that is way to precise for me. I just tore until I had a nice little pile and took my handy dandy decoupage and started going at that little pony.

First I covered him in a solid floral print and then went in and added zebra skin accents. Once the Decoupage had completely dried I went back and added a layer of Triple Thick top coat just to make him nice and shiny.

Once the little pony had dried over night it was time to bust out my handy dandy Dremel. Almost anything can be turned into a piece of jewelry as long as you have your trusty Dremel at your side. The paper mache pony was quite easy to drill and I put my bit to his little jugular and made a hole. I knew I would never be able to get it just right where the horse would hang centered so I decided to save myself a lot of heartache and make him intentionally hang with his head reared.

Once the hole was in place I stacked up some vintage plastic flower petals on a head pin, grabbed my pliers and wrapped myself up a make shift bail. I love the blue plastic feather, now Mr. Pony looks like he could work in Vegas!

There you have it. What was once intended as a book end became one of my new favorite necklaces.

I had extra paper left over so I covered a plain bangle bracelet I had lying around to make a set. I also scored these weird wooden things at Michaels that I also covered in Decopatch and then glued to a bracelet blank.

I taught a class on paper jewelry at Craft-o-Rama Tuesday night where we did some similar projects and I wanted to show you a picture of what everyone made. The Decopatch paper was a big hit. Some people brought their own things to use like foreign money and old greeting cards and speaking of cards someone made the picture on my business card into a necklace. She said she chewed a lot of bubble gum so it was perfect for her!

Do you use patchwork in you crafting? Any other examples I am forgetting. I think what it boils down to is that I love as much color as I can get at one time and patchwork is perfect for that. The more color the better for me in fashion, home décor and in my crafts.