Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Origami Earrings

A friend of mine recently posted in her journal that because she had recently gotten her ears pierced, she had been looking through various Etsy.com shops and finding slews of earrings that she wanted to buy. She provided a link. I'm a curious sort of person, so I followed the link and found that all of the earrings she was looking at were $10 or more! One pair was even $20! "Enough," I told her, "I will make you some earrings and send them to you and you won't have to pay a cent. Additionally, the cost of my materials comes in at a bit less than $15 and I can make maybe 20 pairs of earrings with them. Not a bad deal.

Materials:

Scissors
Needle
Thread (Yellow silk) - $1
Origami Paper Srips - $2.50
Origami Squares - $2.50
Clear Nail Polish (not pictured) - $1
Beads - $5
Fish Hook Earring Bases - $2.10
Optional: 2" Head pins ($2.10), Needle Nose Pliers ($8)

Because I didn't have the head pins, I ended up using needle and thread instead of the pins and pliers. The needle and thread is actually a nice way to lower your overall costs if you find yourself without pliers which can be hard to find and/or costly.

The Origami strips come with directions which allow you to fold them up into handy little stars. When I was younger, my friends and I used to make them by the dozens and fill pretty jars with stars. Fold your stars first.



Next, I threaded my needle with the silk thread. Silk thread can be tricky to work with. You need to really bulk up your knots to make sure stuff doesn't slide right off. So I put the thread through the needle 3 times before tying off a knot on the bottom and trimming it.



Silk thread is also very slippery. To ensure my knots don't come out, I brush the knots and the knot tail with clear nail polish and I wait for it to dry before I trim.

Thread your stars on. I always push stars onto the needle "crotch" first (concave side) so that the needle comes out through a point. I placed beads between my stars to give the earrings a bit more flexibility. You'll find that if you stack stars one on top of the other, they come out stiff and sometimes crooked.



Finally, tie on your fish hook. Again, you should brush with clear nail polish before you do any trimming. And Voila!



I also made her a pair of crane earrings. Same principles apply. I love putting cranes on thread because the knots get hidden inside the crane's body.

Before and After


A pair of Crane Earrings

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