I have been cracking on with my new batch of pendants this week.

They always take longer than I think they should. But that’s because I am always looking to try and get them absolutely perfect.

To this end, I have made a slight adjustment to the design this time around.

You may remember that I ran a giveaway to win one of my pendants a while back – this one, to be precise:

The pendant was won by Sue, who writes the fab blog 129 twig and vine (do pop over if you haven’t already).

It was great that Sue won, not only because I was already a fan of her blog, but also because she took the time and trouble to both let me know that her prize had arrived safely (which took a while – she lives in rural Vermont, USA) and to give me a bit of useful feedback.

Sue mentioned that the the toggle fastener was really tight and tricky to open when taking the necklace off.

So I had a rethink and invested in some new bits of kit…

(Sorry about the crumbs in the photo above – they’re not my breakfast toast, but bits of wood from “roughing up” my pendants prior to glueing!)

I have been attempting to master the art of working with jump rings.

Fiddly isn’t the word!

I have a gadget (that ring thingy in the photo above) to help open and close them. But if anything has indicated that my eyesight is deteriorating, this has.

And it’s so easy to mess them up!

So that instead of nice perfect little silver circles, you end up with useless squashed bits of metal that look something like this:

So anyway, the point of all this fiddling is that now my pendants’ fasteners, instead of looking like this:…look like this:

The new arrangement means that it’s much easier to manoeuvre the toggle clasp and hence easier to put on and take off the necklace.

I would actually much prefer plain ribbon ends, rather than the embossed version you see here. But I can’t find any at the moment. I’ll keep looking. If you see any, give me a shout.

I think that all this jumping through hoops will be worth it in the end…

I’ll show you the rest of the results tomorrow! ♥