Earrings complete an outfit, capture a mood, accentuate the face with its eyes for connection and its mouth for smiling. And yet, earrings don’t receive the attention they deserve from most designers, including me.
It’s not that I don’t make earrings. I do. Nearly every necklace includes earrings. In my mind, however, they have not been elevated to the same level of art as my necklaces. As an experiment, I vowed to make a different pair of unusual earrings every day for 30-days. It didn’t work. I failed to complete the project.
What did happen is that I began to notice the earrings that captured my attention. Shortly after the failed 30-day project, I found myself creating a variety of earrings.
My work with metal prompted me to make earrings combining beads and mixed metal such as the ones pictured here of yellow brass and sterling silver. I used stainless steel to wire weave beads onto these rectangles.
Weaving with wire is challenging in part because its less flexible than thread. Here is a view of another weaving project done with two-hole beads.
On the other hand, these loomed earrings with two-hole beads are lightweight, beautiful and amazingly flexible. I thank Julianna Jewels Avelar who talked with me in about creativity, for inventing the jewel loom, teaching me to use it and inspiring thousands of women with her delightful designs in the book Jewel Loom Inspirations. < />
In a recent group project five of us made Celtic knot earrings. Using a free lesson from a newsletter, we experimented with black, blue and brown leather. The knot was complicated and yet easy to complete. All of us finished in less than one hour.
In an effort to cement my learning, I repeated it the next day choosing a Day of the Dead theme.
It’s a fun result, don’t you agree? I encourage you to begin noticing the details and decide: “What kind of earrings will you make today?’