Help with Tiara making...

[New2tiara's]

I have made some tiara's for a friends wedding, and found I really enjoyed it and want to make more, as I have no more friends getting married I thought I could make them to sell them on Ebay etc.

I need a little help though, if you don't mind. I want to make vintage style tiara's and jewellery and I like the idea of incorporating things into the tiara's e.g. old brooches or broken bits of jewellery that brides want to wear on there wedding day but can't find anything else to do with them.

But I don't want to rely on getting items from brides as I want a portfolio if work to start with. But I am not sure where to get some vintage things from. Do you think I could find a wholesaler of vintage brooches / beads etc or would I need to spend my time getting real vintage things from ebay?

Also, any tips on attaching these items to the tiaras?

Thank you very much for your help.

[beadsbydesign]

To be truely vintage, the items you incorporate into items should be genuinely old. They are therefore going to (on the whole) be one off items. good places to hunt for these sort of things would be charity stores.
Wholesellers who claim to sell "vintage" products are normally selling modern mass produced items that have no age and you would therefore be passing onto your brides modern products.

I design tiaras and jewellery items for brides using their own vintage items. They are usually brooches or earrings that belonged to grandparents or their own parents. I call them my something old something new range.


tiara with brides grandmothers brooch.



necklace created with grandmothers earrings and broken necklace

[beadsbydesign]

sorry, I posted the previous post before I'd finished addeing my thoughts.

With regard to attaching, I always wire the items in. ( I do as little as possible to the item so that if at a future date the bride did want to deconstruct the tiara then it wouldn't have damaged the item. )
You'll have to judge each item on its own merit though as some items may not lend themselves to the wiring process.