Famous Jewelry Collections: THE BEADING GEM'S JOURNAL

Friday, August 3, 2012

THE BEADING GEM'S JOURNAL

How to Recycle Old Floppy Disks and CDs for Jewelry Making

Posted: 03 Aug 2012 04:00 AM PDT

Recycled jewelry artisans are very adapt at spotting potential materials for their work. One obvious source are old floppy disks. Computers today don't even have floppy drives any more but I'm willing to bet, most of us still have some old disks lying around.

If you check out the Craft and Fun blog, the blogger shows what you will find when you dismantle a floppy disk - black magnetic coated plastic disks. The post show the use of a die cutter like the Sizzix Big Shot to cut many small circles. Holes are made in the center so the rounds can be strung together for a cool necklace. The blog is in Italian - use Google Translate to read it. But really, you don't need to as the pictures are self-explanatory.

The same instructor also made this awesome bracelet using the metal discs from the middle of floppy discs. The colored spirals are from handles of shopping bags!

In a world where music and movies have already migrated to DVDs, computers and portable devices and more recently to the cloud, the smaller capacity CDs are fast becoming obsolete.

CDs are essentially a polycarbonate plastic discs with a thin metallic layer (usually aluminum, sometimes gold etc) protected by another layer of lacquer. That mirror-like metal surface is what is attractive about using unwanted CDs to make jewelry. But they are difficult to photograph so be warned!

Izelver on Instructables has written a tutorial on how to make pendants and charms from CDs. She stenciled the shapes she wanted on the CD. She used a Dremel/ flex shaft to cut out and smooth the edges of her designs.

If you are leery of power tools, use a pair of scissors instead like Izzy on Cut Out and Keep to cut out simple shapes. You'll probably have to smooth the edges afterwards.

The CD she used has a pretty pattern on it which is so much more interesting than the usual plain varieties.

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