Once it finally sunk in that we were actually having a baby, I needed to figure out how I wanted to share the news with the family. I wanted to do something special to tell to our parents we were pregnant and I have always loved the old Dick and Jane books. The illustrations are so sweet and remind me of life when I was a kid. I decided nothing could be more sweet than using the illustrations as charms to announce the first baby on the way. I kind of forgot some of the details in the books and was tickled at how similar they were to my life. I can’t believe I never noticed the family has two girls and one boy, which is the same as my family growing up, with the baby being my little sister. Spot the dog even looks like little Elmer and Puff the cat looks like our Pugsy! Putting the bracelets together definitely got me reminiscing about how much fun I had as a kid and how much we will enjoy having our own little one running around I started the bracelets with the pictures of the kids, followed by the pets and Tim the bear, with the final charm announcing the arrival of baby Kelley. I didn’t want them to see the final charm right away so I made sure it was at the end and positioned it in the boxes so the other charms were in clear view. There was the concern that they may completely miss it, but I figured if they were being even slightly observant they would figure it out eventually. It worked exactly how I wanted and they didn’t see the final charm until after they worked through the others. I love how they turned out! Surprisingly they really weren’t too hard to make. Since I didn’t know what I was doing, I decided it was better to not spend too much money in case it didn’t work and decided to use some cheap pearl necklaces from Walmart as the base.. I couldn’t find a bracelet that looked the way I wanted so I purchased a necklace which I was then able to split into two bracelets. I ordered 50 charms, glass domes, and glue off of Etsy, which was a good decision since I messed some up in the process. The pictures had to be all sized to fit in the charms which I did quickly on the computer and was able to print out everything in the correct size. I cut the pictures out, glue them to the charms, and glued the glass on top. My mom’s bracelet worked great and I didn’t run into any problems, but when I started the next one I ended up with the pictures bleeding and becoming discolored and fuzzy after being glued. I decided to do my own cheap lamination, purchased some acid free tape and covered the second set of pictures in a layer of tape before glueing them. I hoped that this would protect the ink and stop the bleeding. It did, although I had some air bubbles but applying enough constant pressure with clothespins helped keep the bubbles to a minimum.
I’m sure if I did some research I may have found a better way to make them and avoid some of the problems in the process, but they all eventually turned out okay.
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