DIY Safety Pin Crafts

So, I was checking out this the other day:

Image courtesy mtv.com

(Yes, that is Kristen Stewart at the MTV Movie Awards. Don’t judge. ) And it hit me – safety pins. Years of being both gothy and crafty taught me a lot – like always have at least one safety pin on you. It’s proven to be a useful habit on more than one occasion and safety pins, like buttons or newsprint, are available in bulk and cheaply.
Years ago, I used to make safety pin bracelets by stringing beads onto the safety pins then stringing the safety pins together on a length of elastic chord. It usually wound up looking something like this:

Image courtesy outsapop.com

Which looks cool and was a fun project – and there are about a million and a half easy variations of that – since safety pins require no adherents, projects are usually pretty straightforward to assemble. Stringing together safety pins onto elastic can also make a belt, necklace or choker.
Other jewelry techniques include randomly stringing safety pins and chains onto an existing necklace (or earrings):

Image courtesy monoxious.com

Or, stringing together safety pins and beads in a patterns onto a chain. Or, my personal favorite, into a huge jumbled mess with a cameo.

Image courtesy oligoville.com

There are just as many options for clothing too – from embellishing a collar or shoulder of a jacket

:

Image courtesy mypreciousconfessions.blogspot.com

to creating an entire design on the back of a shirt, to draping safety pins and chains over boots, to an entire tank made of safety pins (which looks….pokey). You can even craft a top out of a scarf and some safety pins. There’s a goth-as-fuck option of using safety pins to replace the negative space you cut into a shirt, like so:

Image courtesy glamglamhitchhiker.blogspot.com

And a safety pin corset top tutorial here. I can’t believe we didn’t do this earlier.