Lockets -- what to put inside them?

My Hong Kong bead mail (mentioned yesterday) also included a few lockets I fancied. For some reason I ended up not buying one with a cat on!

Unlike yesterday's components I have an idea for at least one of these. One I'm thinking of giving away to someone for christmas so that just leaves one piece to figure out what to do with. It will, however, probably take a little time to finish the first locket as I don't have the supplies needed.

I've seen lockets with embroidered inserts (e.g. Mr. Puffy's Knitting Blog, Wild Olive, Crafty & Devious, The Secret Rose, Stella) so maybe I'll try that, seeing how it combines two of my interests, embroidery and jewellery. Maybe bead embroidery or that'll be too much? For me, lockets can have one of three functions: "practical" (like perfume lockets, some also do lip gloss or lipstick lockets), personal (photo, memento) or pure aesthetics, which preferable has an element of surprise or at least secrecy. These I'm using in the third way and therefore I want to balance the outside and the inside. These lockets aren't blank or discreetly engraved in which case you can combine it with a big, colourful inside. Here, it's a question about whether the outside or the inside is the main feature and about how to balance the two.

Maybe I'm overthinking it, but without a memento or solid perfume inside, they're already like a finished pendant to which I'm to add stuff -- and I want that stuff to work with the image on the front. Otherwise I might just as well keep them like this, without anything inside and without a reason to ever open the locket.

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PS! I just updated the blog with a Locket label. So far I've only ever made two locket necklaces, the perfume locket Viola Odorata and the heart locket In Memoriam with cat pics and hand-painted cat beads, but now they're all collected under one label and hopefully I'll fill it with more stuff in the (near) future.

PPS! I did find some autumn leaves (see previous post), which are drying at the moment and hopefully will hold their colour. And it gave an idea about making pendants annually using the autumn leaves or other objects found during the season and a small piece or scroll of paper with the year on it put inside too. Or perhaps even make a pendant for every season, year after year (ok, wow, that's be an interesting and ambitious project -- which sadly sounds like something you might forget or get bored of after a while).

Viola odorata -- Sweet violet locket

I've already shown some jewellery I've made with readymade ribbon flowers here.

This is another example of a locket I made using a tiny ready-made violet ribbon flower. On its own it felt a bit too boring so I made two violet buds and a round leaf from hand-dyed silk ribbon and added it to the flower. It's a bit fiddly working with the narrow ribbons used here, but I think it was worth it. I stitched the flowers to the filigree front of my brass locket and added a few light bronze fp for a subtle sparkle, which is more visible IRL. I also added a few fp to the 60 cm long antiqued brass chain. I like to think of it as dewdrops.


The locket I've used is deeper than a usual photo locket as it is intended to be filled with solid perfume, as you can see in the pic below. Of cause sweet violet perfume in this case.

In memoriam

This is a really crummy photo of two beads I altered in memory of two of our young cats that died in 2006. Vitis, the whiter cat, was killed in a hit-and-run and Svisston, the blacker one, died of disease a few days later. Their sister is still alive. Randa almost suffered the same faith as Vitis a couple of years later, but after being nowhere to be found, she came home on the fourth day after the accident and today she has fully recovered. (You can read the whole story about her accident here.)

I wanted to create something special to remember them by. In this case I ended up takin two 10 mm peruvian ceramic beads in the shape of cats, one white and one black, which I then painted with acrylics. Using a photo as reference, I managed to make the generic cat beads turn into indviduals very much alike their models.

Unfortunately, the photo doesn't do them justice: the close-up magnifies the details of the brushstrokes and the light and shadows are too harsh. Still, I wanted to show this photo as an example of how a beader can create keepsakes to remember beloved pets that has passed on. These beads still hang, together with the heart-shaped photo locket, above my bed.