Wednesday, April 4, 2012

A Good Day for Earrings

I woke up this morning in a jewelry making mood. Earrings are my favorite things to make. They are quick and easy and oh so cute! But today I wanted to make a necklace with some new beads I got the other day. A few hours later I finished...and decided it was completely hideous and I knew I would never ever wear it. So to make myself feel better I made a pair of earrings.

This pair is made in two separate pieces consisting of wire wrapping and briolette beads.




I started out with the bottom piece, the briolette beads. (Briolette Beads are beads that are strung along the top, out the sides...instead of from the top and bottom)
I used about 3 inches per bead of 20 gauge German Wire (super good for wire wrapping). Its really simple, just string the wire through the bead about a 1/3 of the way. Press the long side up snug to the bead.

Next use your chain nose pliers to straighten the long wire. Then bring the shorter wire up snug against the bead crossing the two wires. I like to have my short wire go behind the longer one.

Just twist the wires together. You can do it like a twisty tie or you can twist the small wire around the long wire like I did, using my pliers at the end to get the tip of the wire twisted close.

Repeat these steps for the other earring.

Next make your loops by clipping your wire to about 1/2 inch long and use your round nose pliers to make your loops pretty.

Moving on to the wire wrapping! This was fun! Just remember it doesn't have to be perfect and they don't have to match!

I used 10mm jump rings and the same 20 gauge wire cut into two pieces of about 5-6 inches each.  I started out with a little loop at one end of my wire and looped it onto the jump ring. Then wrapped it around a few times, changing directions to get the criss cross look. Be sure to make a little loop at the top by tucking the end of your wire into the wrapped wire to connect it to your earring (or you can just directly connect the earring to the ring itself).
(I didn't use the entire strand of my wire. Its good to have extra wire to work with when you are wire wrapping. It's is so much easier to snip off the excess than it is to try to work with the very last bit and make it do what you want.)


To complete it, just connect the bead to the jump ring, then the jump ring to your earring. That's it, piece of cake!



1 comment:

  1. So Cute You will Have to do More stuff like this, because I love it!

    ReplyDelete