Wooden Cut Out Earrings

I would love to have a laser cutter to make earrings in any shape my mind can conceive but such a thing goes against everything we stand for on this blog. We use what we have.

These material-covered wooden cut-outs are cheaply and abundantly available at craft shops. The beauty of these is that you can improve them with a little paint, decoupage or even a fine liner. These were originally plain red butterflies and look at them now! They're plain red butterflies with patterns on!

You will need:

• Two wooden cut-outs in the desired shape, decorated however you see fit.
• A drill with a 1 mm bit
• Two loop-end wire pins (See vocab Tab)
• Round-nosed pliers (See vocab Tab)
• Two basic earring hooks (See vocab Tab)

Method:

Drill a hole in the appropriate section of each of your shapes. Just make sure the hole is in the same place for both earrings.

Push the end of the wire pin through the hole so that there is about 7.5 mm sticking out. Bend the main section of the pin upwards to create a right-angle and then bend the sticky-out bit up behind the shape until it meets the main pin and forms a kind of triangle with it.

Attach the basic hook to the loop at the the top of the pin and then check the direction and angle the earring hangs at. If you're not happy with it you can change the angle by bending the wire pin, or the direction the earring faces, by holding the loop at the top of the pin secure with the pliers and slowly turning the shape to rotate the loop until it's facing the right direction.

Rating:

Effort Required: 3/10

Working with wire is like holding a newborn baby: it's easy once you learn how to make sure it doesn't bend in the wrong places.

Durability: 9/10

It's always nice to be able to put on earrings without having to worry about the weather. 

Cool Factor: 5.5/10

Don't get me wrong; they're nice, light, practical, big enough to be noticed and subtle enough not to be weird. They match well. You can make them unique and own a whole bunch in various colours, sizes and shapes. In some ways they are actually the perfect DIY earrings. In other ways though, meh.

Peg Earrings

I have a friend who rocked up for an exam once with a clothes peg in her hair because she couldn't find a clip. These are a classier kind of cool.

Brace yourself. This list of materials may come as a surprise:

• Two miniature clothes pegs (I made mine multicoloured by taking them apart and putting the halves of different pegs together)
• Super glue 
• Basic studs (See Vocab Tab)

Here's the method. It's worth reading for the one step that isn't obvious from the picture:

Start by gluing the peg shut. This will decrease the chance of the earring breaking if someone tries to pinch it open.

Now stick the pegs onto the studs.

Good job.

Rating:

Effort Required: 1/10

In the time it took you to read this post you could probably have made a pair. At least I haven't wasted much of your time by making it unnecessarily long. Oh, wait, now I just made it longer by saying that. I'm sorry.

Durability: 8.5/10

Fewer steps usually means stronger earrings and more boring posts.

Cool Factor: 6/10

I'm not entirely happy with these. I had wanted to make them so they look like they're actually pegged onto your ears but I couldn't come up with a good enough way to do it. Suggestions?

Felt Flower Earrings

This is more of an idea for an idea

You will need:

• Felt
• A felt-tip pen (Wait, felt can't write on felt! What kind of stupid name is that?) 
• Scissors
• embroidery thread
• A needle
• Super Glue
• Basic studs (See Vocab Tab)

How it's done:

Real simple: draw a small flower shape on the felt and cut it out. Using the needle and embroidery thread stitch a couple of stitches which cross each other at various angles in the middle of the flower. Make sure to start and end off with a double stitch to keep it secure. Super glue the stud to the back of the flower.

Rating:

Effort Required: 3/10

Quick and simple!

Durability: 9/10

They can withstand wind, water, sleep and even violent hugs.

Cool Factor: 5/10

The cool part about these is that they're not just felt flower earrings. They represent endless possibilities for earrings made of felt. They represent hope and versatility and the dying art of stitching stuff. They represent colour and peace and happiness and all those other reasons hippies protested against war. All you see are the flowers though.

Ear Phone Earrings

Teaching has some strange perks. The joy of finding an abandoned set of broken earphones on the classroom floor has been one of my strangest.

You will Need:

• A set of broken earphones. I guess they don't have to be broken when you start but it's always nice not to waste. If they're already broken you get to make something cool out of something useless. You could even call it up-cycling, if you wanted to get fancy about it but I've always thought that the term sounds kind of like an exercise program that's destined for failure.
• Scissors
• Super Glue 
• Basic studs (See Vocab Tab)

How it's Done:

Step one is to cut off the ear pieces, leaving about a thumb length of cord attached to each. 

Step two is to carefully strip the cord (take off the rubbery covering to expose the wires inside) making sure you don't cut the wires in the process. Remove all the covering you can or the effect is somewhat spoiled. In this pair the wires were different colours on each side. This discovery made me happy because all the time I've spent checking my earphones end up in the right ear wasn't a complete waste. It also makes for prettier earrings.

Step three is to wrap the the wires around the ear piece in a criss-cross pattern and then tie a bow in it. Getting the bow right is quite tricky and takes some patience.

Step four depends on what you're working with. If the speaker part of the earphone is still attached and is relatively flat, just super glue the earring stud straight on. If this is not the case, first remove the speaker part from both earrings and then glue some of the cord you cut off, in a coil inside the ear piece to create a fairly level surface you can glue the stud onto.

The final step is to apply a small amount of super glue to each point on your decorative criss-cross where the wires meet. This is to hold them in place and stop them coming undone or slipping off. Keep the gluing subtle though.

Rating:

Effort Required: 5/10

You could save yourself some trouble and just cut the wire off completely but the criss-crossing has the double function of finishing off the earrings and giving them a way to end without making it look like you've performed some kind of brutal decapitation.

Durability: 6/10

The danger with these is not gluing well enough, especially if you stuffed them.

Cool Factor: 8/10

People who think they're cool walk around with earphones in their ears. People who are cool wear them on their ears. It's that simple. 

Postage Stamp Earrings

You know how bored people used to collect books full stamps? Well, my aunt was one of those people. And in case you didn't know, postage stamps are sometimes extremely cool. So I sought a way to combine the awesomeness of earrings with that of stamps and this is the tutorial I came up with to share with you lovely people. Hope you appreciate this... post. Haha, get it? Because they're stamps :)

You will need:

• Two postage stamps of roughly the same size. If you have a pair of identical stamps, great. If not, do what I did and just try to make sure that the stamps you choose are similar or different enough to be cool. Be sure to choose the coolest stamps you can find, but also be mindful of size. Mine are the smaller end of the scale so that they're less irritating. There were some super cool Alice in Wonderland, Benjamin Rabbit and Harry Potter special editions that were just too ridiculously big to use without cutting.

• Cardboard. It needs to be pretty thick, like, thicker than a cereal box, but thinner than corrugated cardboard. I think I used the bottom of a Lindt chocolate box. By all means, use these earrings as an excuse to buy yourself a box of chocolates.

• A needle

• A hammer or something heavy to use as such. 

• Glue

• Scissors

• Clear packaging tape or that clear sticky plastic they use for covering books

• Basic Hooks (See Vocab Tab)

• Round-nosed pliers (See Vocab Tab)

How To:

Glue the stamps to the cardboard and then carefully cut around the reinforced stamps when the glue is dry. If you want to test your patience to the max, try and cut in between the little stamp frills. Alas, I, lacking the patience of a saint, opted for the simpler option of cutting a straight line along the frills. I get away with it because my under cardboard is white.

Then take the little cardboard stamps and cover them, front and back, with whatever form of clear sticky plastic you are using. Make sure you cover the whole thing to seal it properly against moisture.Try and keep any overlapping edges neat and to a minimum.

Lay them flat and use the needle and hammer to pierce holes in the top corner of each stamp. They hang in reflection to the other, so the one going in the left gets a hole in the top left corner, and the one going in the right gets a hole in the top right corner. Make sure you leave enough space for the hole to be secure, but not so much that it messes with the aesthetics of the stamp. 

Use the round-nosed pliers to bend open the loops at the bottom of the basic hooks and attach them by the holes in the stamps. Then close the loops.

Rating:

Effort required: 3.5/10

On the whole, these don't take a lot of time or effort to make. The part that gets a little finicky is the covering with plastic because sticky does not have much discretion.

Durability: 6/10

When you consider they're made of paper and cardboard, that's pretty good. They're not particularly elaborate, hence higher durability. This score does however, depend on the thickness of your cardboard, the placement of your holes and your taping prowess. 

Cool Factor: 7/10 

What I like about these is the history involved. Stamps are cool. And they're even cooler because the art of stamp collecting has been somewhat lost on our generation. They're vintage and unique, if you choose the right stamps. The idea has been done before, but not in this way (I googled it) so if you wear them out, you aren't likely to meet someone wearing the same thing (unless they too, are part of our slowly increasing fan-base). They are not always immediately identifiable, but they're still pretty.

Let us know what you think! Your input is greatly appreciated, so let us know if you have any comments, challenges, suggestions or feedback of any sort. We want to see your finished product!  If you like what you see then please follow us and if you want to keep up to date on our latest posts, follow My Earring Board on Pinterest. Thanks for taking the time to view our blog!

Pokeball Earrings

These are a sort of tribute to a friend of mine who loves Pokemon and bad puns. You just have to make sure you catch them all.

You will need:

• Two small, hollow plastic balls of some sort. Mine actually came from a magic trick my aunt brought back from Japan so if you can't think of another place to get some, I suggest looking there.
• Red and white acrylic paint (those being two separate colours. I don't mean pink.)*
• Black permanent marker
• Drill with thin bit
• Flat-end wire pins (see Vocab Tab)
• Round-nosed pliers (see Vocab Tab)
• Cutters (see Vocab Tab)
• Basic earring hooks (see Vocab Tab)

*By the way Meredith, I borrowed your paint. It's on my desk if you need it.

How to:

The first step is the painting. If your spheres don't have a line around the middle you should probably draw one on first. Mine did though. So there.

Paint the white half first because then you can touch up with the red. You'll probably need to do a couple of layers depending on the base colour but try to keep it smooth and even. Usually you will be wearing them both, not taking a photo of the best one like I get to do, so keep it tidy.

After you've painted half of it red and half of it white and done enough layers of each colour and waited for it to dry properly, carefully draw a line around middle of the ball at in black permanent marker at the point where the red and white meet. It's best to keep it thin at first because you can thicken it to even it out.

Once you've drawn a line right around the ball, chose the messiest portion of that line to draw on the black circle. (This is the part that goes around the white button in the middle.) It's easiest to colour the whole circle in black and then pain in the white part on top. Again start small and make it bigger to get it even. Also keep in mind that it's important to get line thickness and circle size the same on both earrings. You're just going to have to assume I did that too.

I used the back of the paint brush to stamp the white circle in the middle of the black because I felt like it was more accurate than my trying to paint one.

Use the red and/or white paint to neaten up the black if you need to. You may only move onto the next step once your Pokeball looks perfect and is completely dry.

The next step is to drill a hole through the ball from the middle of the red at the top to the middle of the white at the bottom. I guess that you could drill from white to red if you really wanted to, but the important part is that you get the hole in the middle and keep it straight.

Insert a flat-end wire pin through the hole from the white side to the red. Getting the pin through can take patience. Cut of the protruding section of pin to about 1cm and twist it into a loop.

Finally you may attach the hooks and wear them.

Rating:

Effort Required: 6/10

When I took on this idea I didn't actually realize how long it would take and what a delicate process doing it freehand would be. I could probably have fetched some masking tape and made this twice as easy but then I would have had to get up and look for it. It's up to you whether or not to believe the effort score of someone too lazy to even make her own job easier.

Durability: 8/10

My brain is vaguely throwing out the objection that paint is not supposed to stick to plastic but this paint doesn't seem to know that. 

Cool Factor: 8/10

It's Pokemon. If you disagree with this score you probably never watched it as a kid which means you are either too young to be wielding a permanent marker, too old to be caring about how cool you look, or think Pokemon is evil - in which case you have more pressing issues.