Today’s necklace DIY is one that came about after being inspired by this piece that I saw while sorting through my stash of magazines.

I'm still such a magazine girl - as fun as it is to read them on a tablet, I always get so much inspiration flipping through the pages and tearing/cutting up/tagging my favorite outfits and accessories. I had an OG Pinterest board (aka a big scrapbook) that I used to paste outfit ideas in with a glue stick many, many years back. Guaranteed there are quite a few Cher Horowitz looks in it! Enough with the reminiscing...back to the necklace!

I met up with my crafty partner-in-crime, Sonya Nimri, for a jewelry making day. Using a Cricut Cuttlebug and some scrap pieces of leather, we were going to have our copycat necklace in no time. We used a diamond shape template to create our leather shapes just because there weren't any long oval shaped ones in our stash that would match the inspiration piece. The essence of the original necklace will still be there!

We placed our leather on top of the template and wound it through the Cuttlebug to get perfectly cut diamond shaped pieces.

We cranked and cranked to create a stash of diamonds in three different sizes.

We needed to punch holes in each shape, so using an awl, we stamped the top of each diamond. These holes allowed jump rings to be attached, making each shape ready to be hung from a chain.

After spacing and a color design was decided upon, each diamond was added to a chain. Unfortunately, none of the chains I had on hand had big enough links to fit the jump rings, so I picked one up in the jewelry making section at Jo-Ann's. There were tons of options and all were super reasonable, in case you run into the same issue as me!

After adding all the leather bits and clasping the jump rings with pliers, the copycat necklace was complete!

I love me some statement necklaces!!

Always love the sneaky shots that I don't know about when other people are playing photog :)

You can find leather scraps in the remnants section at your local fabric store, or what I love doing is buying old beat up leather garments and just cutting pieces from those.