Every year, we all have the same problem – what do we get our mums for mothers’ day? Though I don’t entirely approve of the concept of set days for anything, that’s another topic for another blog post. This year I decided to do something special, and what’s more special than handmade stuff?

I should explain, our family has a mascot, a cuddly fox known as Smiley. He lives in our living room, and always comes on holiday with us. So I decided to make a necklace of him. I have a fairly limited set of tools available to me, but certainly not a plotter, CNC machine or laser cutter, so this had to be hand made. Obviously I needed a template, as I’m no freehand expert. I traced a photo of Smiley on my graphics tablet to create a silhouette with simplified features.

But what material to use? At first I made a couple of prototypes with old flooring tile. It cut very quickly and cleanly with the cutting disk on a dremel, and the end result was quite decent for a first attempt. But I didn’t feel my mum would really care to wear a piece of flooring tile round her neck. An old circuit board seemed the perfect answer. The board you see there is from the back of a Samsung LCD panel, chosen for its intricacy in the traces and screen printing, as well as being very thin (under 1mm). The components came off the board very easily using a heat gun. Again the cutting disk on the dremel worked well, with edge finishing using a tapered cutter. I chose to detail one side only using an engraving ball cutter to expose the copper underneath, as the other side seemed elegant enough already with its complicated traces and screen printing.

Finally I added a 2mm leather cord from ebay, packaged the necklace in an old jeweller’s box and wrapped it in paper printed with a repeating pattern of the fox template. The one you see here is my Gran’s, I made her a similar necklace.

Both Mum and my Gran were delighted!