Planetary Necklace

Friends of mine who are into crafts and are very much aware of my love for all things cosmic, tend to send me links on social media that lead to Etsy.com and other internet places with relatively expensive stuff and one of those friends showed me a planet bracelet, which I really fancied but as I reckoned that I might be able to make the stuff myself, I gave it a try. In approximately an hour I had a necklace featuring Venus, Earth, the Moon (which I chose over Mercury), Mars, Jupiter and Neptune. Beautiful Saturn and Uranus were left out due to their rings.

This instructable is very much flexible - you don't need to make a necklace, like I did, but you may also use this technique to make earrings, a bracelet, pendants or brooches. Use this as you want - below follows the instructions concerning how I made it.

Pictures of planets (or other objects of your choice)

Printer

Printer paper

A photo editing program (If you don't have any, Gimp is for free!)

1 pair of small sharp paper scissors

1-2 pairs of pliers capable of opening as well as closing rings

6 empty metal pendants (plastic will do as well, but metal I recommend metal for a more genuine look) with an inner diameter of 14 millimeters.

6 pieces of circular decorative glass stones with an outer diameter of 14 millimeters.

A metal jewelry chain (if you have a plain chain, i.e. not a necklace chain, you will also want to get a clasp for it as well)

6 additional metal rings with a diameter of approximately 3 millimeters

Stone glue

Decoupage varnish/glue

1 paint brush

Some ear tops

1 ruler

A sheet of A4 paper

1 pencil

Find the planets or objects that you want for your pendants. The websites of NASA and Hubble offer a variety of nice photos. Otherwise, just use Google.

Open the photo editing software and crop off as much excessive space outside the planets as possible. Resize the images so that they will fit with the glass and pendants. Heads up on the resolution - the images you download will have different resolution so in order to make them all the same size set the same resolution to all the images as you resize them (I only used 72 dpi and a pixel width and height of 43)

Print the images.

Use the scissors to cut out the planets. Don't worry if you don't manage to cut out perfect circles - glueing the planets to the glass will hide uneven edges.

Bring out the decoupage glue and the brush and apply a layer on the first cut out planet. Then press it together with one of the pieces of glass and then apply a layer on the backside of the paper. Repeat the same procedure with the other planets.

The decoupage glue dries quickly when dealing with small amounts so whilst you're waiting for this to dry, you might as well already start preparing the pendants with thin layers of stone glue. Use the ear tops in order to spread the glue evenly, then put the pieces of glass with planet images in position. Press lightly and wait for the stone glue to dry. The drying process should take about 30 minutes.

Prepare the chain and stretch it out on a sheet of white paper (if you did like I did and got yourself a plain chain without a clasp, now is also the time to attach the clasp). Use the ruler and pencil to make marks in the paper, parallel to where you want the pendants on the chain. Then open the rings, hook them onto chosen places on the chain, then hook the pendants on the rings and close the rings. Voilá, you're done!