Easy to Make Glow Jewelry

These are easy to make Glow In The Dark Jewelry items.

This covers my simple experiments in making "Glow In The Dark" pendants.

To make these you'll need the following:

1) Several types of Glow In The Dark paints.

2) Modge Podge.

3) Cording. I used leather cording.

4) Quartz Crystal Points. I got mine from Hobby Lobby.

I have had on the back burner a project to copy the glowing crystal from Disneys "Atlantis The lost Continent" movie.

"Glowing Items" are also a staple of many fantasy tales.

The Disney toy used an LED, which worked until the battery finally died.

I decided to use standard Glow In The Dark paints and inexpensive objects to test what kind of paints are best to use for this particular project. I bought the following: Glow Neutral, Glow Green, Glow Yellow, a package of acrylic Glow and Neon paints, and a Florescent yellow that glows under black light.

These are the test pendants I made, using various paints.

The first test I just used the paint, and the paint easily peeled off after it was dry, so then I tried mixing the paint with Modge Podge, which is a sealer and a protectant. And it worked well: The paint didn't rub off easily afterwards. So I used this method to make all of the test jewelry.

The first pic is of the green paint and the cheapie acrylic paint: The paint concealed the quartz crystal underneath.

The second pic is how it looks in the dark. The glow fades after about thirty seconds.

The third pic is of a squarish plastic cube I had in my junk, and the green gem is a clear plastic gemstone I drilled a hole through as a test piece. The cube I painted with Neutral Glow paint.

I painted the back of the gemstone with the Florescent Yellow paint, then painted the back over with black paint to conceal the gaudy yellow Florescent paint. The fourth pic is of the cube glowing in the dark, and it didn't cover up or obscure the plastic cube.

The fifth is of another quartz point, which I painted with the Modge Podge/Glow Neutral paint mixture. This doesn't cover up very much of the quartz and it glows more brightly than the green paint.

THIS is the results of the Florescent painted gemstone on the right.

The paint is not Glow In The Dark so it doesn't glow under normal circumstances. However when an ultraviolet light is shone on it, it glows brightly, as it does in the second and third pic.

The black paint on the back of it means only the front of it glows. Which is what I wanted in the first place.

This type of pendant would be effective in a nightclub that has black lights inside it. But would stop glowing the moment the light no longer shone on it.

When I was playing around with my ultraviolet LED flashlight I found that the Glow in the dark paint reacted to it as well. The glow was brighter than from ordinary light and took about 45 seconds to a minute to fade away. ALL of the glow in the dark paints did this.

To make the final pendant, I just used a length of leather cord. I tied the ends together and made it long enough to go over my head. To keep it from sliding around I tied a coiled length of darker leather around the cord just above the pendant.

In normal light it looks like just another Quartz pendant... And it glows in the dark for a short time.