How to make earrings: easy project tutorial

If you’re new to beading, why not try this easy beading earring project? If you’ve seen or handled a pair of jewellery pliers before, this project should take you around 10 minutes! If not, allow half an hour!

For this project, you’ll need:

• 2 x silver plated fish hook earring wires
• 2 x silver plated headpins
• 2 x silver plated eyepins
• 2 x red swarovski butterfly beads (5mm)
• 2 x silver swarovski bicone beads (4mm)
• 4 x silver swarovski bicone beads (2mm)
• round nose jewellery pliers
• wire cutters
• flat nose jewellery pliers

Step 1

Slide a butterfly bead onto a headpin (a headpin has a flat head on one end to stop a bead from falling off). Using your round nose pliers, place the tip onto the headpin as close to the bead as possible. Use your fingers to pull the headpin over to one side like in the photo below.

Step 2

Use your wire cutters to snip off part of the headpin wire. You should leave around 10mm of wire next to the bead as you’ll use this to form a loop in the next step.

Step 3

Use the round nose pliers again, this time to form a loop with the remaining piece of headpin wire. This can be tricky to get the hang of but basically, you just need to squeeze the pliers firmly and curl them back towards you to make a loop.

And so, it should look something like this:

Sometimes loops can end up off centre, so you can use your flat nose pliers to ease the loop back into a straighter position if need be.

Step 4

For the next component of the earring project, slide a 2mm bicone, a 4mm bicone and a 2mm bicone onto an eyepin in this order, like in the photo below. An eyepin already has a loop at one end which means that you can easily make this into a connector component!

Step 5

As in step 1, use your round nose pliers to hold the eyepin above the set of three beads and pull the wire with your fingers over to one side. Snip with the wire cutters as before and form a loop with this other end of the eyepin. But don’t close the loop up yet!

Step 6

Take one of the fish hook ear wires and add it to this open loop before closing the loop up.

Step 7

Open the bottom eyepin loop and add the butterfly component onto the eyepin before closing it again.

Step 8

Follow steps 1 to 7 to make the second earring component. Hey presto, you have made a pair of very sparkly, dangly earrings!

You can substitute the beads here with any colour and type of beads that you like and you could also make more components for extra long earrings.

A quick note on forming loops: the more you tweak, open and close a loop, the weaker the headpin or eyepin wire will become, so just bear this in mind! If your loops go a bit wrong and you find yourself pulling them backwards and forwards with your pliers, just use another headpin or eyepin, as your earring component could snap easily if the wire is weakened somewhat.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this tutorial about how to make earrings. If you have any comments, please leave them here!