Wine and Gold Earrings

Most of the cabochons that I have bought have come in pairs so I tend to work with them as a pair just so I won’t end up with an odd cabochon that wouldn’t match anything else. So I have been turning all my cabochon pairs into earrings.

 If you have followed my blog at all you will know that I have only made brooches so far and I think I have got quite a good handle on that but when it came to earrings I had no idea what I was doing. There was a little bit of trial and error in to how to get the earring hook to stay and not move about. When I first attached the hook the earring kept turning so that the back was showing instead of the front and I needed to find a way of sewing on the hook so that when the earring was on it wouldn’t turn and have the back on display. I don’t know if I am totally happy about the final way I have attached the hook but at least the earring is staying in the right place and there isn’t that much thread showing. I will need to do some more research on how to attach earring hooks and find a method that I like best.

This earring has an 18x25 vintage wine colored cabochon in the middle. The colour of the cabochon to me is a little flat. The other vintage cabochons I bought, have some different shades in them when the light hits them, but this cab is purple through and through so in order to make it pop a little bit I used this metallic melon seed beads as well as these variegated purple beads which I had not used before for the bezel.

For the next round I had these beautiful variegated faceted purple beads but I did not have enough of one size to go around both earrings but I did have a smaller size of the same beads so I ended up using both in somewhat of a staggered effect. The upper part of the earring holds the smaller size of the beads and the lower part has the bigger beads.

I did a sunshine edge around the finished piece and just used the same purple seed beads and faceted beads I had used for the main bead embroidery part to do an edging all the way around except for the very top of the earring where I made a larger loop where I trapped in the earring hook. In order to get both earrings to be as identical as possible I put them back to back to mark where the edging beads on the other pair should go.

I think for a first pass at making earrings I have done OK, I do believe there is room improvement when it comes to attaching the earring hook but I guess that will come with more practice. Let me know what you guys think. Do you know a better way to attach an earring hook?

List of materials used:

• METALLIC EGGPLANT IRIS SEED BEADS SIZE 11/0
• TRANSPARENT AMETHYST GOLD LUSTRE SIZE 11/0 
• GALVANIZED MELON SEED BEADS SIZE 11/0 
• METALLIC BURGUNDY BROWN SEED BEADS SIZE 11/0 
• GOLD METAL ROUND SEED BEADS SIZE 15/0 
• TRANSPARENT GOLD AMETHYST SEED BEADS SIZE 15/0 
• 3MM PURPLE IRIS FIRE POLISHED GLASS  
• 4MM PURPLE IRIS FIRE POLISHED GLASS BEADS 
• 4MM MULTI IRIS FACETED BEADS FROM THE BEAD GALLERY
• 6MM MULTI IRIS FACETED BEADS FROM THE BEAD GALLERY
• FIRELINE 0.006 THREAD IN CLEAR
• LACY’S STIFF STUFF
• BLACK ULTRASUEDE
• E-6000 GLUE
• 14CT GOLD EARRING HOOKS FROM MICHAELS

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