Jewelry Blog

Make your own luck, literally, when you make these Lucky Four-Leaf Clover Wire and Crystal Earrings. Each earring has a tiny little four-leaf clover wire charm dangling from the ends, which you fabricate with copper wire. I preferred to use copper wire for all the components and even the ear hooks for this design, but you could use any metal you like such as brass or sterling silver.

You’ll need the following supplies and materials:

2 1/2 feet of dead-soft 21-gauge copper wire
4 - 6mm Swarovski bicone emerald green crystal beads
2 - 6mm Swarovski cube-shaped clear AB crystal beads
12 - 4.5mm copper daisy beads
Wire cutters
Round-nosed pliers
Chain-nosed pliers
Nylon-nosed pliers
Ruler

When I first started making simple beaded jewelry, I remember a stinging criticism I received from a woman. “All your earrings look the same. Do you have any hoops?” I came home with hurt feelings. However, this gave me the seed for an idea which eventually allowed me to design hoops using beads and bead tips. Eventually, I combined this idea with freshwater pearls to make these “Pearl Hoops.”

You’ll need:

20 3-4mm freshwater pearl beads

2 bead tips

size .010 beading wire

wire cutters

glue

2 ear hooks

flat/bent nosed pliers

1. Slip 10 pearls onto your thread and cut the thread allowing an extra few inches on either side of our pearls.

2. Put both ends of your thread through the hole of your bead tip.

3. Tie 2 over hand knots, and tighten them to they rest inside the shell of your bead tip.

4. Trim off excess thread (using wire cutters), and dab a little glue onto your knot.

5. Use bent nosed pliers to close the bead tip around the knot.

6. Repeat steps 1 - 6 for the other earring.

7. Add an ear hook to the hook on one bead tip.

8. Use round nosed pliers to close the hook.

9. Repeat steps 8 & 9 for the other earring.

This is just one example of how you can take a criticism and use it to create a new design.

Here’s a printer friendly copy of this file.

Meta stamps are very cool. You can use them to stamp messages into sheet metal, metal clay, polymer clay, or paper clay. Having a variety of typefaces is handy too if you are into creating stamped jewelry using metal stamps, so I thought this new set available from Infinity Stamps was pretty cool.

It’s called the “American Typewriter Designer Stamp Set,” and it comes in lower case letters, upper case letters, or a number and symbol set as well. Like most of their other metal stamps, this new set is made from quality grade heat-treated steel.