Elongated penny charm bracelet

This is by far one of my favorite crafts I have learned about on Pinterest. I love elongated/squished/pressed pennies. Whatever you call them, they are such a fun souvenir and quite addictive. There are whole websites dedicated to them. These are a few of my favorites here, here and here. I have hundreds possibly a thousand. I have been collecting for certain since 2000 but I have a couple that predate that. But other than storing them in the penny books by date and event that I collected them, I have never done anything with them. Until now. Yahoo!!! Now I can wear my beauties and every time I look at them they will remind me of a wonderful trip.

My first bracelet is all Disneyland pennies. They are all duplicates from my collection. When my sons were young they wanted to collect their own, now that they are older they don't care about them anymore. So I have taken eight of the duplicates or even triplicates and made my first charm bracelet. I love it!

I found all the jewelry making components I needed at Michael's. They had everything in copper, so that was nice. I love the bracelet closure that I found, it is a ring and the other end is a bar that goes through the ring and then when flattened out it won't fall through. Best thing is that it makes it very simple for me to put it on all by myself. Which is important because I won't wear this continuously, so getting it on and off easily is a bonus.

I used my crop-o-dile to punch the holes in the pennies. I don't know where I got the idea to do that, because now as I review the tutorial on the Pinterest link, it doesn't say anything about a crop-o-dile.  But it worked like a boss and I did not have any sharp edges on my pennies.

I have plans to make another one with pennies from my trips to Maui and Walt Disney World. And from now on I will intentionally collect some duplicates so that I have some to collect and some to create with.

Find inspiration everywhere! Go... Create something fun & fabulous. Enjoy!