I have been making a lot of earrings lately. I have a tiny window of time in the evenings after baby has gone to sleep (IF she goes to sleep quickly) and it is really satisfying to be able to complete a project in that time. I have discovered that making earrings is like a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re going to get, and you can’t stop after one. I’ll show you what I mean with some (clumsily) edited images as I didn’t take photos along the way.
First I made a pair of earrings using lampwork beads on dark pink coloured wire. I framed the focal beads with baby pink seed beads, which I also added to a pink niobium ear-wire. I love using niobium ear-wires because they come in different colours and they have the bonus of being hypo-allergenic.
This time the colour of the niobium ear-wire worried me as it didn’t quite match the wire I had used to wrap the beads – it was more of a dusty purple pink and looked a bit dull in comparison to the wire. As there were touches of silver visible in the lampwork bead I changed the ear-wires to titanium.
I liked the combination of the pink seed beads with a pair of white beads that had orange and yellow speckles. I decided if I was adding pink, I’d really pink it up, so I used super bright pink wire. I had planned to frame the focal bead with the pink seed beads, but while I was wrapping the beads I decided that the yellow beads looked better on the pink wire. I added a tassel of bead charms (including pink) to the bottom of the earrings to link with the pink beads on the ear-wires.
Now the pink beads didn’t look right on the ear-wires since I had framed the focal beads with yellow beads. Therefore I made some new ear-wires with yellow beads on instead.
The dusty pink colour of the ear-wire still didn’t look right to me so I changed the ear-wires again. This time I used purple ear-wires (the brightness levels matched) with a coil of the pink wire I had used to wrap the beads.
Now if you’ve been keeping track you will realise I had two pairs of unused pink ear-wires (one with pink beads and another with yellow). So I made another two pairs of earrings…
The tassel on the long earrings went through a few iterations before I was happy, but the earrings with the yellow, purple and clear rectangle came together on the first try. And that’s how one pair of earrings became four.
Here are some of the other earrings I am in the process of listing in my shops – Zibbet (listings are in USD) and Folksy (listings are in GBP).
