Artful Jewelry

Jo Packham’s book Artful Jewelry: Craft and Wear Your Own Masterpieces takes it’s inspiration from fine art to create simple pieces of jewelry, and comes with supplies to make 6 of the projects illustrated in the book.
This is a great gift option for teens. The projects are simple and have a lot of room for personal interpretation. The instructions are clear and easy to follow and the supplies are easy to find. Now that it’s summer, if you’re looking for fun summer projects, this is the book for it.
Each project starts with a photograph of a masterpiece painting and a bit of history about the art and the artist which makes it’s educational as well. The paintings chosen for the book are some of my favorites.
Da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine is followed up by how to make paper beads, art from Egypt inspires a safety pin and elastic bracelet that does resemble some of the ornate beadwork from that age. Van Gogh’s legendary Starry Nights is followed up by a gorgeous necklace made with embroidery floss that echoes some of the shapes and colors in the painting and can be made in an evening.
The book covers working with jump rings, knotting friendship bracelets, working with wire and simple head pin earrings, wrapping bases with embroidery floss and making paper beads.
It includes supplies for several of the projects including Vermeer’s “pearl” earring, a bangle bracelet and the above mentioned Starry Nights necklace.
My daughter likes it a lot and can do the projects unsupervised, she’s 14, so I’d recommend it for 10-15 year olds or younger with some light supervision.
If you’d like to get this book, you can get it directly from Chronicle Books or by clicking the Amazon.com link below.