Sweet Pea Charm Bracelet

Haa ha! You didn't expect to see me back again today did you? Well here I am like the proverbial bad penny bringing you details of this weeks challenge over at Sweet Pea Stampers. The challenge this week is to Make A Gift.

As I'm really pushed for time at the moment, I decided that I'd do something really quick and easy, the only thing was I really wanted some beautifully coloured Ching-Chou-Kuik images to use for the charms. However, as each image can take a good couple of hours to colour, there was no way that stamping and colouring images was an option. Luckily for me I won the last challenge over at The Crafty Purple Frog and my prize was any five decoupage or pyramage sheets of my choice, so thanks Amy I hope you like what I've done with your sheets!

For those of you who have followed my blog for any length of time, you may recall that last Christmas I used one of these images to make a really speedy decorated candle? Well I've used the images in the same way for this bracelet except I've put them on shrink plastic.

In order to get the main part of the decoupage sheet image, I used Gimp to select the required image and then pasted it into a word processing document (I'm sure there are far easier ways of doing this, but I was in a hurry and need to things to work for me like yesterday!!). I then resized the image and used a mask to lighten the colours. The image was then printed onto inkjet printable shrink plastic, allowed to dry for a few minutes and then cut out. Once I'd punched any required holes, I shrank the plastic down with my heat gun.

The backs and sides of the charms looked really ugly, so I decided to use embossing powder to cover them. Once that had been done, I covered the front with Glossy Accents, allowed it to dry and then coated the back and sides, before adding a further coat to the front.

Finally, the charms and beads were attached to a bracelet that I picked up in Claire's Accessories sale for 50p.

Materials
Images - The Crafty Purple Frog
Inkjet Shrink Plastic - Crafty Computer Paper
Heat It Up Silver Embossing Powder
Versamark
Heat Gun
Jewellery findings/beads

I'd like to enter this bracelet into the following challenges:
Top Tip Tuesday - A gift
Ooh La La Creations - Anything but a card
Just Some Lines - Handmade Gifts