December 18th - Deathly Hallows

Today's Harry Potter themed Christmas Ornament Advent Calendar gift is the Deathly Hallows Symbol. I bought some necklace pendants off eBay (please note that links may expire with time, and they will not be updated or fixed) that I thought would do the job, but I was quite disappointed to see how small they were when they arrived in the mail. Thankfully, though, help will always be given on Google to those who ask for it! So I asked for help, and found a picture of an item discontinued from Etsy, where this smallish deathly hallows-pendant was hung in front of a slightly larger circular metal plate, engraved with the words "Mischief Managed". The result was very nice, so I decided to try something like that, but with the word "Always" rather than "Mischief Managed".

My husband is very handy and has a full mechanical workshop where he works, so we went there and punched out a bunch of circles out of eloxed aluminium, 5-6 cm in diameter. These had to be flattened, filed and sanded a bit, I wasn't able to make them as perfect as I'd have liked, but they'd have to do. Engraving is something I'd never tried before, and I had a couple of practise runs with my husband's Dremel, but I really wasn't happy with the result. That's when he suggested metal stamping, and showed me his metal stamp alphabet. I gave that a few tries as well and decided that stamping would be best. I stamped a bunch of my aluminium plates, and selected the 8 nicest ones. Next I drilled a hole in each plate and fastened the charm to the plate by making a ring out of my jewelry metal wire. Of course each ornament was completed with a pretty, swirly, beaded ornament hook. Voilà!