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Last Updated on August 19, 2021 by Katherine
This week’s blog post is a tutorial on how to make yourself a festive pair of Christmas earrings using jewelry wire and Christmas lights. Yes, actual Christmas lights!
This tutorial uses wire wrapping to encase a Christmas bulb into a “cage”, which will form the dangle part of your earring. The total estimated cost for one pair of earrings will cost you just over $1. Since you will have to buy larger packaging, expect to spend closer to $20. This earring tutorial is perfect for a beginner.
It’s okay though! I enjoy having a few multiples of the items I need on hand. You can start again if you make a mistake that you can’t unravel, and you can make multiple earrings if you enjoy this tutorial.
So let’s dive right in and make ourselves a pair of festive earrings.
What You Need:
- Jewelry wire (I prefer this wire from Panda Hall available through Amazon)
- If you aren’t interested in a package, a single roll of jewelry making wire is fine.
- Christmas Lights (You can buy replacement bulbs, I bought mine at Wal-mart)
- Earring hooks (You can find these anywhere they sell jewelry-making supplies)
- Round-nose pliers
- Wire snips
- Eye pins and beads (optional)
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Cut Your Wire
My rule for jewelry wire is always cut more than you think you’ll need, you can always cut extra off but you cannot add any length. I typically start with two lengths of 15 inches (one for each earring).
Make a Loop & Twist
I use the widest part of my round-nose pliers (read more about pliers in my earlier post) to make a loop around the halfway mark on the length of wire. Then you’ll take your wire ends and twist them around each other.
The loop is that will rest on the front part of the light (around the largest part of it) so you can feed the wire tails through it and form a “cage” for that part of your earring. The twisted part of the wire will need to rise above the top part of the light so you can have a loop (or bale) to attach your earring hook on.
For best results, keep your wire ends so they form a triangle as you turn them over, this will prevent them from twisting over each other. Use your light to measure how much more twisting you must do as you’ll want the twisting to stop right near the bottom part.
Tying Up Loose Ends
Once you’ve twisted to near the bottom of your Christmas light, loop it around the bottom and up toward the loop, feeding each wire through the loop and back out on the same side.
Next, wrap your wire tails around the screw of the light, I like to end with the end on the back part of the earring, so you can snip off any excess wire there and tuck the tails into the bale.
Now you just attach the earring hook, or you can add a little beaded eye pin attachment to add more festive flair before topping the earring off with a hook.
Final Thoughts
I love wire-wrapping and adding in some Christmas lights is a perfect festive twist to making some earrings. You can experiment with different metals and colors of lights too and they make perfectly sized gifts for stockings.
I love how easy these Christmas earrings are to create; it makes it suitable if you have a few gifts to give this season as you won’t be spending days creating these items for your crew! Also, you won’t need to spend a fortune either as you can likely use one spool of wire for multiple projects and you’ll be able to find decently priced large packages of earring hooks and Christmas bulbs.
I hope you enjoyed this week’s post and if you did, I would love to hear all about it in the comments down below or share this post on your favorite social media platform using a button on the side or above or below. If you are a pinner, you can also pin this post to Pinterest!
That is all for this week. Join me next week for a post on how to DIY your very own flapper girl costume, just in time for Halloween 2020! I know Halloween is likely to look a lot different this year with the pandemic, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have a little fun!
