Making Swing Style Earrings

Flexible beading wire is most used for necklaces and bracelets, but below is a way to make simple, modern swing style earrings.

First, remember that threading the beads with the wire still on the spool, instead of cutting the wire in advance, makes the wire less likely to kink and helps to eliminate waste.

Beading Your Wire Earrings

What you will need:

• Jewelry Findings - 2 Crimp beads, 1 Pair of ear wires
• Jewelry Beads - 64 seed beads, 2 interesting 9mm beads
• Flexible beading wire - 2 x 6 inch of silver
• Crimp pliers
• Flat/round nosed pliers
• Wire cutters

 

 

How to make them:

1. Slide a crimp bead onto the spool of beading wire, followed by 16 seed beads, one 9mm bead and then 16 more seed beads.

 


Slide the beads onto beading wire

 

2. Take the tail of the wire and thread it back through the crimp bead, making a teardrop shape approximately 3/4in (2cm) wide, and 1 1/4 in (3cm) long under the crimp bead. Take up any slack from the spool end instead of the tail end to conserve wire. Leave the wire tail about 3/4in (2cm) long.

 


Making a teardrop shape

 

3. Hold the earring between your fingertips right under the crimp bead. Turn the tail of the wire under the back through the crimp bead, forming a loop. Pull so that the loop measures about 1 1/2in (4cm).

 


Forming the loop

 

4. Put the crimp bead in the crimping pliers parallel to the loop. Crimp the bead, and then trim the excess wire.

 


Crimp the bead

 

5. Repeat steps 1-3 for the second earring.



6. To finish, attach the loops to ear wires, using chain-nose or bent chain-nose pliers to open and close the jump rings.

 

 

When learning the basics of how to make homemade earrings, size and weight need to be considered, but apart from that, anything goes. There are findings to attach any type of earring, bead or pendant to any ear wire...