Monday, October 17, 2011

DIY Feather Earrings

The feather earrings trend is fine and dandy, but I’d enjoy them more DIY style!  Behold the DIY feather earring.

You’ll need a pair of needle nose pliers, your chose of feathers, glue (preferably a hot glue gun), a set of earring hooks, an old piece of jewelry and about 7 inches of leather suede or hemp cording.

Take your needle nose pliers and your grandma’s old jewelry – NOOO. I’m just kidding, don’t you dare take apart grandmama's old jewelry, just give it to me.  Look over your old piece of jewelry (instead of grandmas vintage keepsakes), and decide what pieces you’d like to use from it.  Once you’ve decided, take your needle nose pliers and begin taking apart the pieces you’d like to use for your feather earrings.

Attach the open clasp from your old piece of jewelry to the opening on your lone earring hook.  If you don’t have any extra clasps, you can purchase them at your local art or fabric store.

Close the clasp using your needle nose pliers.

Voila, step one completed.  You can stop here if you’d like.

I found another old piece of jewelry that I decided to incorporate into my earrings mid DIY.  These silver stars.  Use the needle nose pliers to unhook the selected stars (in my case).  Hook the desired stars to your new earring chain where you’d like them, close the clasps using your needle nose pliers.

You can stop here if you like.

Now to the good part.  Gather your feathers together at the quill ends and hot glue them in place.

Take your lone earring hook, complete with chains and or stars and line the start of the chains with the feather quills.  Once aligned, dab a bit of hot glue between the earring and feathers to glue them together.  Remember, you want to line THE START of the chains with the feather quills, if you line the earring hook instead you won’t be able to get your earring on.

Take your leather suede or hemp cording and cut it to about 7inches.  Begin to rap the cording around your new feather earring where you have hot glued it.  Once all the cording has been rapped around the earring, hot glue the ends in place.

Wait until all the parts have dried and then cut off any raw edges or pointy quills.


There you have it, your DIY feather earrings.  You can do mismatch pairs or DIY a lone earring.  The two earrings pictured here are lone earrings, so I’ll sport one at a time.  Get creative with your designs, and put some of that old jewelry to good use! (Don't forget to cut down those exposed quills like I did, oops).

Enjoy!



   


 

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