Making earrings is just about the most fun. Well, for me anyway. The average set of earrings doesn’t usually take me more than a half an hour to make. But it can take me longer than that to select the materials. Mainly because I tend to get distracted by all the pretty beads and findings.

Often, making earrings is where I try out new techniques or design ideas. You can find out quickly if it isn’t going to work, or if it will be unattractive, before you’ve put a lot of time and materials into it.

These required soldering and wire wrapping.

I make most earrings with wire working techniques. I’ve made a few that required soldering, but that isn’t my preferred method.

There are instances where using the torch would be easier. But I enjoy the challenge of trying to figure a way to get the same look without soldering it.

Granted, over the years, some of my earring creations have bordered on the bizarre. Mostly, though, they have been fairly main stream. But even the bizarre are still easily wearable. I have a book of 500 earrings. Some of them are way more bizarre than I’ve ever done and some of them are so weird I can’t actually imagine wearing them. But it’s a great book for new ideas.

Not really bizarre, but definitely different.

I dabbled for a while with mismatched pairs where both earrings were made from the same materials but arranged differently. This was many years ago and I think I might simply have been ahead of my time. I’ve seen some of that on various websites lately. But for the most part, earrings still match.

There is one thing that irritates me. I’ll see a nice design, maybe a double spiral, for example. And the artist has not bothered to make them mirror images of each other. To me, that is just wrong. I feel there needs to be balance. I don’t have a lot of “rules” when it comes to earrings, but that is one.

It begins with selecting the materials.

Then you start putting them together.

Add another element and wrap the wire. Final step is adding the ear wire.

And voila!

When I feel like making something, but I don’t know what to make, I can always make a pair of earrings.

That’s the beauty of it.

Image courtesy of A-Z Quotes