Hogwarts Houses Pendants

Hogwarts houses pendants. Four houses, four styles, four unique results.

Uniqueness, that's the key word, you know. I specifically tried to be unique for a while, but that's not how it works. When deliberately searching for uniqueness, you get carried away and will question everything you make. All it takes to make unique designs, is a piece of paper, a pencil, and putting the word unique out of your head for a while. You are already unique. You just need to be yourself.

So, why exactly am I talking about uniqueness? After writing 99 instructables, I didn't just want to repeat something I had already done before. I want to keep trying new things, never stop looking and experimenting. For all four pendants in this instructable I tried new techniques, but the most important part for me was making them match to the styles of the houses. And you know what? I absolutely love what I created here : )

Some of you are probably wondering why I made a single instructable about four different pendants. Well, there are a few reasons:

First of all, they may be four different pendants, but they most certainly are one single project. If I would have put this into four separate instructables, they would have got quite repetitive.

But, and maybe just as important, I started these pendants when I had 96 instructables. Posting them as separate instructable would have meant one of these pendants would have been my 100th instructable, while actually only being part of a project.

Slytherin

Step 2 - 22

Hufflepuff

Step 23 - 39

Gryffindor

Step 40 - 53

Ravenclaw

Step 54 - 74

Final results

Step 75

When thinking of Slytherin, the first thing that came to my mind was Celtic. Now, if there's one thing I've learned over the past few yours, it's that you should always listen to what your mind has to say, even if you're not sure where it might take you. I remembered seeing this great instructable for a celtic knot pendant a while ago and decided to base my design on the knotted, somewhat triangle-like pattern.

To keep it right dimension-wise, I started by drawing a triangle. In this triangle I sketched the three lines that make up the base, from corner to corner. To give the pendant a bit more 'depth', I added three arcs, parallel to the ones already drawn. At the corners and at the overlapping parts I drew green beads. To finish it, I filled up the lines with a zigzagged pattern to indicate wire-weaving.

To make this pendant, you will need:

- wire, gauge 21/ 0,81 mm and gauge 26/ 0,46 mm

- three beads

- cord

- wide, round object (I used a pencil sharpener)

- pliers

Please note: this step and the next step were made simultaneously, so I can't really put them in the right order.

The most perfect beads. Exactly the right colour, nice and facetted, perfect for the pendant, right? Unfortunately, it was just too good to be true. Although their look was perfect, their size was not. They were way too big for this pendant. So, I continued looking.

Eventually I found these small, round, green cateye beads. The colour wasn't exactly what I was looking for, but they were green and had the right size, so I decided to use them anyway.

To create a right-sized drawing, I took a piece of graph paper and stuck to drawing inside a 4 by 4 cm area. In this area, I started by drawing a equilateral triangle, using one side of the square as the first side of the triangle. For the other two sides, I drew a 4 cm line to the middle line of the square.

Next, the base arcs were added from corner to corner. To complete the design, I drew parallel arcs, starting at about 0,5 cm from the corners.

Shown here are the baselines for the knot pattern. This is the part that will be made out of a single piece of wire.

Take your gauge 21/ 0,81 mm wire. Cut off a piece long enough to make your base out of. I used approximately 30 cm.

Place the wire on the scaled drawing. As you can see in the third picture, the wire extends a bit after the baselines on top. This part will be used to make the loop.

Use your round object to shape the first curve. My pencil sharpener wasn't a perfect match, but enough to get it kind of in the right shape. After that you can correct it using your hands/ pliers, just put it on top of the drawing to check if it lines up. Once it does, move on to the next step.

Use your round nose pliers to bend the wire in the corner. You can also use flat nose pliers, but round nose pliers will give you a bit of a softer, more gentle corner, which I prefer for this pendant. Let the wire go behind the arc you already bent and repeat last step to shape this arc as well.

The last arc is the trickiest, after bending the corner it will need to go over the first arc and under the the second arc. Well, you can also see it in the fourth picture : ) After that you just need to shape it like the other two.

Once your baselines are completed, it's time to bend the loop. Start by making sure the wires cross each other exactly in the right place. Then, take your round nose pliers and place them just a bit above the crossing point of the wire. Bend one of the wires around it first and work away the end, repeat your steps for the second loop thereafter.

Since the base is finished now, it's time to start making the parallel arcs. Cut off a piece of wire. Clamp the end down using flat nose pliers and bend the wire in an arc, comparable to the arcs you used for the baseline but slightly smaller. At the end of the arc, simply use the flat nose pliers again to let the wire go in the right direction. Cut off the ends.

As you can see in the first picture, it doesn't exactly fit yet. Cut off any wire that extends past the pendant.

Shape the other two arcs as well.

Cut off a piece of gauge 26/ 0,46 mm wire and coil it around both loops. This will lock the base in it's shape, so make sure that it looks exactly the way you want it to look.

To see if everything fits the way you intended, you can simply place the base on a piece of paper and test fit your beads. This is when I decided to leave the middle of the pendant empty, I think it would have ruined the look.

As you can see, the ends of the arc don't really line up with the base. They are slightly too long and too straight, cut off a small part (careful not to cut too much) and bend it in a bit of a curve.

To add the arcs to your base, take a piece of gauge 26/ 0,46 mm wire. Wrap it around the base twice first, before wrapping it around both the base and the arc. Continue wrapping until you reach the end of the part that lines up with the base.

Repeat this for the other side and for the other arcs.

When putting the beads into position, it's possible that one doesn't really fit anymore. As you can see, the top space was too small to fit a bead in for me. I undid the wrapping on one of the sides, cut off a bit of the end and bent the wire again, before rewrapping the part.

If you can put all three of your beads in the available spaces without them being forced into position, your base is completed.

Just a quick front and back view of the completed base.

To add the beads to the base, cut off a piece of gauge 26/ 0,46 mm wire and insert it trough the bead. Let the bead sit just about in the middle of it. Place the bead in its position and wrap both ends of the wire around the base a few times to secure it in place.

Cut off a piece of cord, long enough to be a necklace. Make a knot with both ends and fold it in half. Put the end through the front of the pendant and pull the knotted end through the loop this creates (see hufflepuff pendant for full picture instruction)

Ah, fails. A bit annoying when you make them yourself, but quite useful to read when you want to try a project yourself.

When bending the second arc of the base, I let it go in front of the first one instead of behind it. If I would have been more familiar with the design, it wouldn't have been a problem, but when following example pictures to make the knot it's not really helpful ; ) . Fixing this mistake was the trickiest part though, since that meant carefully unbending it, letting it go to the right side and rebending it.

"If you have ambition you might not achieve anything, but without ambition, you are most certain not to achieve anything"

- Whitfield Diffie

When I say Hufflepuff, my mind says swirls. "Hufflepuff." "Swirls." And you know what, it actually sounds quite harmonious. The only thing left to do was join that harmony in a circle and add beads to the design!

To make this pendant, you will need:

- wire, gauge 21/ 0,81 mm and gauge 26/ 0,46 mm

- a lot of yellow beads, I used 20

- cord

- pliers

- round object, diameter approximately 4 cm / mandrel

Why do the perfect beads always turn out to be not so perfect after all?

The beads in the first picture were the ones I found first. Cute, small, yellow, great. After looking everywhere, those five were the only ones I could find, for from enough for my design. I could have redesigned it to only need five beads, but I liked the design way too much for that : )

I ended up using quite simple glass beads, I actually also used these for my hogwarts houses bracelets!

Just like with the Slytherin pendant, I fitted the design within a 4 by 4 cm area.

Since it's all based inside a circle, drawing this on the right scale was quite simple. The only thing that really needed to be the right size was the circle, after that I could just fill it up with the three swirls.

To make sure you have enough beads, place them on top of your scaled drawing. You may need to add or remove beads based on the results you have. Keep in mind though, you might not get the exact same results when actually making the pendant. I ended up using more beads than I had initially planned.

The reason I divided them in three little group is that there were three slightly different colours, so I wanted to make sure the colours were evenly divided.

For the base circle, you can simply calculate the length of wire you'll need. A diameter of 4 cm, multiplied with pi, gives a length of 12,56 cm. Add a few centimeters to make the loop with.

Take your round object and bend the wire around it, starting in the middle. Bend the extra bit of wire as well. Once you have the entire circle, take a pair of round nose pliers and hold the top of the pendant with the tip of the pliers. This is in the middle of the two overlapping parts. Bend the ends straight until they are in the position shown in picture number three.

Use the pliers again, the wider part this time, to bend the loops. Start by bending one of the wires around it and work away the end, repeat your steps for the second loop thereafter.

Yes, I know the beads and swirls are already added in this step and no, it's not the wrong order. See step 39, the fails, for an explanation.

Take a piece of gauge 26/ 0,46 mm wire and coil it around both loops. This will prevent the base shape from deforming and it will keep the loops together. To end the wire, simply cut it off and clamp the end down using flat pliers.

Take your round nose pliers and use them to start the swirl. Next, keep bending the wire while trying to trace the drawing as precise as possible. Cut off the part that extends past the line you're tracing. Repeat the swirling and tracing for the other two pieces of wire.

Cut off a piece of gauge 26/ 0,46 mm wire. Wrap it around the top of the base, just under the loop, two times first. Hold the swirl next to the base and wrap around both wires. Repeat this a few times before adding the first bead, making sure that there's enough distance between the loop and the coiling to prevent the bead from touching the loop. Keep repeating this until the wire of the swirl starts separating from the base wire. The amount of beads you'll be able to use on that part depends on the size of your beads.

To add your next swirl, hold it at the point were the first swirl starts getting away from the base circle. While keeping it in place, continue wrapping like you did with the first swirl.

Keep coiling the wire and adding beads until you reach the part were the third swirl separates from the base circle or until you run out of wire.

If you run out of wire, the best solution is to end in about halfway between two beads. The beads need a bit of a sturdy connection and the switch of wire creates a weak point. Keeping that weak point as far away from the beads as possible makes it almost unnoticeable.

To continue wrapping, cut off a new piece of wire and start coiling again.

Once you reach the end of the third swirl, stop wrapping the base circle and continue with only wrapping the swirl.

Keep repeating the wrapping pattern of coils and beads until you are satisfied with the amount of beads you used. For me, that was when I was at about three quarters of the swirl. After that, just keep coiling until you reach the end, until you are happy with the way it looks or, you know, until you run out of wire ; )

Cut off a piece of cord, long enough to be a necklace. Make a knot with both ends and fold it in half. Put the end through the front of the pendant and pull the knotted end through the loop this creates

Although the mistakes seemed to be endless when making this pendant, they actually only consisted of one thing!: black wire. I thought it would be a good idea to use black wire as wrapping material, instead of the silver-coloured wire I always use.

Of course, I was wrong ; ) The wire was slightly thinner than the silver wire, but that wasn't the main problem. The biggest problem was that this stuff doesn't stay in place after bending it. Now, it wouldn't have been that big of a problem, and maybe to others it still isn't, but the wrapped wire didn't stay nicely wrapped. The base wire, silver coloured, started showing up through the black wire, creating a very messy unfinished look.

So, I took all of the black wire off and moved back to my silver wire.

"Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible."

- Dalai Lama

When I started this design, I didn't have a clue of how I wanted it to look like. The first thing I drew was the square (sort of) that you can see in pencil lines around the pendant. After doing that I realised that I wanted the pendant to be made up of doodling, yet still be organised. This wavy design is what I ended up with : )

To make this pendant, you will need:

- wire, gauge 21/ 0,81 mm and gauge 26/ 0,46 mm

- red beads

- cord

- pliers

For this pendant, the beads I found first were not the perfect ones. The colour was nice, but they were way too irregularly shaped. The ones I ended up using are a bit like the ones used for the hufflepuff pendant, but smaller and matte instead of shiny. I also used them for this bracelet.

In my sketch, the waves were drawn vertically, just like in the left scaled drawing. This left me with a bit of a problem, however: the loop. So, I slightly changed the design by making the waves horizontal instead. This way the end of the wire could simply be formed into a loop.

Apart from that, I just stuck to the 4 x 4 area and tried to draw the waves as symmetrical as possible.

To know how much wire you'll need, take a piece of string and follow the drawn line with it. Measure the length to learn approximately how much wire you'll need.

The total measured length was 27 cm, to deal with the loop and ending the wire, I cut off about 30 cm of wire.

Start by making a loop just as with the previous two pendants. The difference here is that there's only one loop, making it unnecessary to have it line up perfectly.

After that, for the first few curves you can use round nose pliers to bend them. The wider ones might take a combination of a mandrel and your hands.

However, don't bend them just yet, read the next step first.

After each curve, add a bead to the wire. It doesn't have to to be in perfect position, as long as it's on the right part of the pendant it's okay.

Once all the waves have been traced and all the beads have been added, you can end this however you want. I stuck with a simple swirl, keeping it within the pattern of the waves.

Take a piece of the thin wire and wrap the loop with it. Since the loop is just a single wire now, it's a lot simpler to coil the wire evenly.

Take a new piece of thin wire and coil it around the point where the first wave meets the second one. Wrap the small, remaining part towards the loop until you run out. Coil the other side towards the first bead. Stop wrapping once you're so close to the bead that the wire won't fit between the base and the bead anymore

To get past the bead, put the wire through it and pull it through. It's not the easiest thing to do, but it works quite well. What's important is to pull it through far enough, that gives the least obvious look (something I didn't do for the first bead).

After that first bead, you might have space to coil around the base wire, but it's also possible that you're already at the part where the base wires touch. If that's the case, wrap the wire twice around both wires.

A bit of coiling later, you'll come across the part where you double wrapped the first and second wave. The wire is quite close to each other here, so it might be necessary to wrap around both wires once more. To get past the double part, just continue wrapping on the other side of it, while making sure to pass it on the back of the pendant.

For the other times this happened, I just let the wire go behind the double wrap and continued wrapping on the other side, which is the technique I would recommend.

Cut off a piece of cord, long enough to be a necklace. Make a knot with both ends and fold it in half. Put the end through the front of the pendant and pull the knotted end through the loop this creates (see hufflepuff pendant for full picture instruction)

The first thing I tried after wrapping the loop, was using that same piece of wire and just continue wrapping the base with it. Well, that didn't work. It ended up looking really sloppy, so I unwrapped it and ended the wire at the end of the loop.

While the sketch gave quite a few ideas of how I wanted to make this pendant, I still had no idea how I was going to keep the beads in place. At first I tried to go for a look with a bit more wire by coiling between the sides of the waves, but it wasn't really working. The last picture is a variation on that idea, when I thought I could use that technique with one side gold-coloured wire and one side red or silver.

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear."

- Ambrose Redmoon

For the Ravenclaw sketch, I wanted to do something completely different than with the other three pendants. Instead of using beads, I based the design on a stone, inspired by the look of Rowena Ravenclaw's Diadem. I wanted the stone to be enclosed by a wire-wrapped base, simple yet beautiful.

On top of the stone I sketched a crossed pattern, nothing too complicated, to keep the stone in place.

To make this pendant, you will need:

- wire, gauge 21/ 0,81 mm and gauge 26/ 0,46 mm

- cardboard

- paint

- brushes

- cord

- pliers

- glue

Start by drawing the oval shape on a piece of cardboard. About the size: I gave it a height of approximately 4 cm.

Cut out the shape and trace it a bunch of times, I drew 11 pieces but ended up using 10, so that should be enough.

Quite straightforward actually, just take your scissors and cut out the shapes you traced. After the cutting you can stack them to see whether you think the thickness of the stone is right or not.

To make the fake stone a bit rounder, you'll need to have parts that are just slightly different in size. For the first two layers, use two regular pieces you cut out. For the next two layers, remove a small piece of the side to make it slightly smaller. Keep repeating this, for the top layers it might be better to use only one piece of that size, but that's about what you think works best.

Take your glue and glue the layers together in the right order. Make sure to put all the pieces in the middle.

The multiple layers of cardboard don't give a very smooth edge, but that can be fixed in a few steps.

Wait for the glue to dry completely before doing this, you don't want the layers to shift. Take basically anything with a nice, smooth, wide edge, I just took the side of the handle of my scissors. Run it across the edges to smooth out the layers a bit.

The third picture shows the difference this step creates.

After smoothing out most of the irregularities, you can use a nail file to get it even better. Be careful where you do this step though, it gives a bit of a mess.

To get the right colour:

Start with the darker blue, add a small blob of black and brighter blue. Mix it all together and add silver paint. After adding the silver paint, the colour changes a bit so you could add a bit of the brighter blue to get the paint blue enough, yet still sparkly because of the silver paint.

Take a brush and paint the top of the stone first. The grey cardboard only took one layer to cover.

Once the top has dried completely, turn it around. This part was a bit trickier to get covered, since it has the coloured design of the box I used on it. Be sure to wait long enough between layers, you don't want to ruin a previous layer with your next one.

Exactly what the title says ; ) The colour looks a lot better in real life though, it just doesn't come through on the pictures.

After a bit of experimenting (See the 'fails' for those results) I still didn't know how I was going to capture the stone in the wire without ruining the simplistic look.

And you know what, simplicity is all this pendant needs! A wire wrapped piece, made with two base wires, wrapped around the stone.

To get an idea of how much wire this would take, I measured the circumference, rounded it up to take the loop into account as well and multiplied it with two, since it's a double wire. This gave me a measurement of approximately 30 cm.

Cut off the 30 cm of wire and fold it in half. Cut off a long piece of thin wire as well. Wrap the wire around the first base wire two times, then let it go to the other side as pictured and wrap it around that wire twice. Keep repeating this.

To know when to stop wrapping, take a piece of string and put it around the stone. Cut it off exactly where the end meets the string again.

Once your wire wrapped piece has the same length as the piece of string, you can stop wrapping.

Finish your last coiling part and cut off the remaining wire. Clamp down the end to prevent it from damaging anything.

Place the beginning of the wire wrapped piece in the middle of the top side of the pendant. Carefully bend it around the corner to know where to bend, use round nose pliers to bend it further. Check if the pendant fits after bending. Repeat this for the other corners.

Bend the remaining part up first and then shape it into loops using round nose pliers, one wire at the time. Try to let the loops line up as good as possible.

Once they're all bend, wrap a piece of thin wire around it to keep them together. Start this piece on the beginning of the wrapped part, that will automatically close the base.

Add the stone to the base and cut off another piece of gauge 26/ 0,46 mm wire. Secure it to the top of the base and make a vertical line all over the back of the stone. Wrap the wire around the base on the other side to keep it in place and to secure the stone.

Cut off a piece of cord, long enough to be a necklace. Make a knot with both ends and fold it in half. Put the end through the front of the pendant and pull the knotted end through the loop this creates (see hufflepuff pendant for full picture instruction)

In my first attempt I made a base using a traced image of the stone. So far, so good. To get the wire wrapped sides, I strangely thought it would be a good idea to use a separate piece of wire, put that on top of the pendant and wrap the space between the two parts. Well that didn't work. It turned into a chaotic, asymmetrical mess.

So, maybe I should have made a back for the pendant first? A bunch of wire later I ended up with a pendant, the one in the last picture with the crossing wires on top, only to conclude one thing: I don't like it ; )

“It's the questions we can't answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he'll look for his own answers.”

- Patrick Rothfuss

And well, this is it I suppose, the 100th time writing a last step, checking the entire draft, before publishing it.

100 instructables,

yet every single instructable I publish still feels like that very first origami crane instruction,

1288 days since my first instructable,

yet every day I am amazed by this community,

2100 amazing followers,

yet every new one puts a smile on my face

986.136 views,

yet every time I see that number go up I just look at it, like I still can't believe it's true.

But it is true, thanks to you, the person reading this instructable.

Thank you : )