One of our granddaughters, our little Songbird, is celebrating her fourth birthday. She is fascinated with the alphabet and is quickly learning the sounds the letters make as well as learning how to write each letter. Because she loves necklaces, I thought she would enjoy a customizable necklace of the letters of the alphabet.

I first formed letters of the alphabet from purple polymer clay and baked them to hold their shape. Next I made a block bead for each letter to fit into, inscribed various designs on all the sides of the blocks, lightly colored the blocks with light purple powdered pigment and baked. Purple is her current favorite color. To add a little variety, I also made small round beads of pink—her second favorite color. I bent wire to hold each letter unit together and added a spring clasp to the top.

To make sure the letters stayed in each block, I put a small bit of Sculpey Bake & Bond on the back of each letter before baking in the block. You can see in the picture below some of the designs I put on the blocks using pins, tiny cookie cutters and whatever else was available. In this post, I shared suggestions for texturing clay with things found around the house.

Of course, the letters needed a place to be stored and I found a cute purse shaped wooden box at Michaels craft store and a little wooden bird.

After painting and gluing some flannel fabric inside the purse, it made an adorable storage “box”.

Songbird will be able to connect the letters together to make simple words as she begins to learn to read.

Or she can string a bunch of letters together to make a necklace to wear.

I also included a silver chain to which she can attach whatever words or letters she fancies for the day.

I hope she enjoys playing with it as much as her Auntie Melinda did when she saw it.