jeweled pin – Sue At Home

For Sophia’s Glamtastic birthday party, we decided to make a custom party favor for all of Sophia’s friends. Each girl got a gem-covered pin with her initial and a simple little jewelry box with jewels on top. Sophia and Lily are ready so let’s get to it!

For the jewelry boxes, I bought some basic wooden boxes from Oriental Trading. We thought about painting them but figured it might get messy so we decided to keep it simple and just add some jewels. We had a mega bag of Big Bling from Michael’s so we used those (and had tons left for many more projects.) Sophia did most of them herself by gluing them with glitter glue so if a little gooped out, it still looked great. She did a sort of haphazard grouping of gems on each one and I was very impressed with her attention to detail and her restraint. I wouldn’t have known when to stop but she did. (Of course, Lily served as gem-sorting assistant.)

As for the pins, I was inspired by these from Markus Lupfer. I had seen them months ago on Net-a-Porter and thought they were begging to be DIY’d.

But ultimately, the idea of a black varsity letter–no matter how glam-atized with sequins–was just too sporty for our theme. So I decided to make felt pins with gems instead. I started out by picking a clean sans serif font and printing out XL versions of the letters I needed.

The next step was to trace the shape of each letter onto my hot pink felt. Note: I traced them backwards so if a little pen showed after I cut them out, it would be on the back.

I felt like I was cutting these babies forever! But finally they were done.

Next, I glued them to silver and gold cardstock and cut them out again leaving a little edge of cardstock sticking out. Then I glued gems on with fabric glue.

Once the gems were dry, I glued pins on the back with Gorilla glue (because nothing will make that stuff budge!). By the way: it was Sophia’s idea to make some gold and some silver and since she was the creative director of the project, I had to listen to her. Right?

I’m so glad I took the time to make the letter templates. The S on the left was my prototype and the one on the right was made with the template. So. Much. Better.

I love how they all look together.

The pins fit perfectly in the little jewelry boxes. We just added a little tissue paper pillow to each one so they’d all be comfy!

Of course, once we we got the pins all nestled in their boxes, we realized that we needed some way to know which letter was in each one so I went back to Picmonkey and made a bunch of little tags that match the invitation.

Then I tied them on to the boxes and the favors were ready to go!

We stacked them up on the foyer table so we wouldn’t forget to give them out as everyone left. I put the invitation in a frame to set the mood! (You know – in case anyone forgot why they were there!)