Pop of Color

I’ve made paper jewelry before in my DIY: Paper Earrings project, but this time I decided to focus on using paint swatches for a pop of color. Paint swatches have just about every color imaginable and in particular the trendier colors of the season. One of the nice things about using paint swatches is that they’re printed on thicker paper so they’re pretty durable, and the coating on them gives them more resistance to water than the average paper stock. Granted, since they are paper they won’t last forever, but I think they’re a simple way to add some color to jewelry—and the colors can be switched out as often as you like.

For this necklace I measured and marked on the back of each paint swatch the size of the pieces I wanted. Then I used my x-acto knife and ruler to cut them out; my pieces were 0.25 inch wide and 2, 2.5 and 3 inches in length. I punched holes at the top of each rectangle and used jump rings to connect them to a chain and finished by adding a clasp.

After I’d made this necklace, I realized that the paint swatch pieces may not always stay flat against me and that the backside of the swatches could show. The backside of a paint swatch isn’t very exciting as it’s just filled with type. If I were to make this again I might glue two paint swatch backs together and (after the glue dried) then cut out my shapes from that so that no paint swatch back would ever show. Plus, it could be interesting to use two different colors that could add some visual interest or make a piece of jewelry reversible.

This necklace wasn’t very difficult to make. However, it is a bit of work to make paper jewelry considering it doesn’t have a long lifespan, but I think it could be worth it if you have a very specific color you want your jewelry to be.