Making lockets

So I get these ideas that I am really excited about and can't help but volunteer them... then while I am making this stuff I wonder what in the world I was thinking.  But when the project is complete, I [usually] decide it was worth it.   Here is what we gave our girls as their momento at Young Women in Excellence:

Our theme was "Seek After These Things" with an emphasis on the blessings of the temple.  As a presidency we decided that we wanted to give them something that would help them remember the things we have been learning and doing over the past year, but that wouldn't just add more clutter to their rooms and lives.  Janay suggested a bracelet and asked if I thought we would be able to make something like the virtue one on Jenny Phillips website (we have 50 girls so we knew that whatever we did it would have to be low cost and therefore we would probably have to make it ourselves).  I started looking online for somewhere to order bulk jewelery and found a company called Pandahall. As I was looking at beads I saw these cool lockets and voille!  An idea was born.  We could add a lobster clasp and the girls could attach them to a necklace, cellphone, keychain, bracelet, binder... so versatile!  Also they would be cheaper and easier than making a bunch of bracelets (only about 60 cents per girl) so I suggested it and the rest of the presidency loved it.  The only real problem I foresaw was that Pandahall is located in China, but I figured since I was ordering a month and a half in advance and they promised delivery in 20-25 days it would give plenty of time for them to get here and me to add the picture of the temple and the clasps.  Um no.  So the weekend before YWIE, when they still weren't here I decided I had to come up with a backup plan.  I went to HobbyLobby and walked down the jewelry isle trying to get some inspiration.  I saw some bracelets that I realized I could take apart to make charms out of.  So I bought 6 (each one had 9 charms) and went home to scan, crop and paste, and print the "seek" page out of the dictionary.  Then I used a 1/2 inch hole punch to cut out the word/definition and mod podged them onto each charm.  Shauna had some resin gel left over from camp that I used to make it look like they had a glass covering.  We had those for the night of the program and two weeks later the lockets arrived.  Thanks to the seek charm it was a more involved process than I anticipated, but I think it really adds to the locket and the overall total for each girl still ended up right around $1.  We totally stayed within our budget and the girls LOVE them.  And that makes the process worth it.