Drat. You’ve sat down to make those fabulous earrings for your friend’s birthday pressie and found you’ve run out of earwires! You could just order some more and it’ll probably take a day or two to arrive. Or you could just make some in less than two minutes and get cracking on the earring project you’ve been itching to make for the last week! Providing you haven’t run out of eyepins that is. The one I’ve made is on the left by the way in this above picture!
Here’s how to make earwires. You’ll need the following:
- Round nose pliers
- Flat nose pliers
- eyepin finding x 2 (silver plated, brass, sterling silver, gunmetal – your choice!)
- 2 x 2mm or 2.5mm beads – round or bicone
Step 1
Take the eyepin (an eyepin has a loop at one end) and place the tip of your flat nose pliers above the loop. Pull the wire with your fingers over to one side like in the picture below. It’ll look tidier if you pull the wire the opposite way to where the loop will open.
Step 2
Slide one of the beads onto the wire so that it sits just above the loop. With your round nose pliers place the base of them (the widest part) on the wire that you’ve pulled over to one side and pull the wire the opposite way to form a circle shape, like this:
Step 3
Use the same pliers to bend the wire back up slightly at the bottom so that you get a fishhook earwire shape. That’s it! I haven’t done this here but if you like, you could flatten the bottom part of your earwires with a jewellery hammer and steel bench block to give them a really polished look.
Step 4 (optional)
You could jazz them up with a sparkly swarovski bicone above the loop!
Step 5 (optional)
Or you could just make some really funky earwires that are bound to stand out! For this one below, I just used some fuschia pink artistic wire (0.5mm 24 gauge)that I had lying around.
So, if you can’t wait until you buy a job lot of earwires, have a go at making some!
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