diy sequins (and a bit of sequin history) cw for sewing needles

 disclaimer! if you do this you gotta be very careful because cut metal cans can be very sharp and you have to be careful with needles too, I personally haven't been at all hurt doing this but there is the possibility.

(this is kinda a backstory thing feel free to skip to how to make them in the next paragraph) So, I really like sequins and I wanted some to craft with but I didn't want to buy them because most sequins you can buy are plastic and are probably bad for the environment (no judgement to people who buy plastic sequins). Anyways, I wondered what they made sequins out of before plastic and it was a little difficult to find good info on but what I found was that the first sequins were made of metal (in most earlier cases gold) which made sense. Also kinda unrelated but in the 1930s sequins were made out of gelatin to be more lightweight than the metal ones, but would melt if they got too hot. Also In the 19th century, the wings of jewel beetles were used to embellish  clothing (https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1387342/dress/ here is a link to a dress) which I think sort of counts as sequins. 

 OK, so what I did was cut open a soda can and at first I tried cutting them out with scissors but that sucked and they looked bad and it took a while, but I got a hole punch and that worked great. I was worried about them maybe being too sharp to be used on clothes but they were fine. Anyways you cut out a piece of a clean soda can from the middle and you can just use scissors for that and then you ya know hole punch it and once you have that metal circle you get a needle and I have a little notch in my desk which helped with this but you just poke the needle in the middle to make a hole which is difficult and i put something with more surface area to press down on the needle with so it's easier. after that i poke the needle with the sequin on it in a piece of cardboard I got from a paper towel roll and then i pull it all the way through so the eye of the needle goes through the sequin. 


Im sorry if that was wordy and hard to understand maybe I will make a video or something with pictures to go along with if anybody's interested :} i'll try to post pics of my sequins later because I sewed some on a glove