A quick (and fun) earring project

My daughter Meghan is a girly girl. On any given day, at 7 years old, she is much more put together than I am. Her clothes are girly, her hair is just so and now that she has pierced ears, the earrings need to match. I am not good at making jewelry whatsoever but I thought Meg and I could give an easy earring project a try.

There are lots of places online to get beads, jewelry findings, etc. Take a few minutes to do a Google search and you'll come up with lots of choices. We happen to have a bead store in town so Meg and I got the added pleasure of being able to shop together. She picked out exactly what she wanted and the store was helpful in making sure we had everything we needed.

You really only need a few items to have a cute pair of earrings. Here is what we used. We have 2 pumpkin charms to go with our Halloween theme, 4 Swarovski crystals, 2 head pins and 2 sterling silver ear wires.

There are various different types of ways to put the earrings in your ears. Meg just decided that these were the wires she wanted to use.

This was the fun part for Meghan. She was able to construct the earrings all by herself. On the head pin, she strung a crystal, the bead and another crystal. That's all there is to it.

We used the crystals to kind of anchor the bead to the head pin better so it wouldn't slide as much as the hole in the crystals is narrower than the bead. I'm not sure if I explained it properly, but take my word for it, it fits better.

The jack-o-lantern bead was slightly smaller than a couple of other ones we did, so we then cut just a tad off of the head pin wire. Then, using our pliers, we bent the wire to a 90 degree angle to the top crystal.

Somewhere in my crafting area, I know I have the proper tools. For the life of me though, they are in such a safe place, that I cannot find them.

The beauty of being an all around crafter is that if I don't have the exact tool I need, odds are I'll have something that will work.

Remember a few years back when wire was all the rage. All of a sudden everyone was going to put cute little wire "things" all over their scrapbook pages and on their cards. I thought I would too. Have you ever seen a card of mine where I used wire??? I have exactly ONE design where I used wire and that was about 4 years ago.

But this little tool has been sitting in my tool box all that time and voila, I was able to use it for Meg's earrings.

After you bend the wire to 90 degrees you take the end of it and start turning it into a circle. Since I'm am so not a natural at that process, it took me some time and as you'll see with the pumpkin earrings, it's not perfectly pretty. But does Meg care? Nope - the earrings are cute and I made it so they will not come apart. It may not be pretty but it works. And when you're showing off the cute little earrings you and your mom made to all your second grade friends, it really doesn't matter if they are perfect.

And here is the finished project, in Meghan's ears. She had such fun doing these and we enjoyed working on the project together. After doing three different pairs, we're getting better at making the loops.

By the time, we get to cute little earrings for Christmas, I bet we'll have it down pat.

These are the little pink ghosts we made. They have clear crystals above and below them.

And here are my personal favorites, the black cats. As you can see, Meg chose orange crystals for these.

And there is our little mother/daughter jewelry project. It's very basic but a perfect project to try when just starting out. We experienced success without getting frustrated and that success has whet our appetite for more projects.

If you happen to have any tips or suggestions for me, I would love to hear them. I'm hoping to give more projects a try and would welcome any words of wisdom!