Earrings are Great

I love earrings, i love dangly ones, I love long ones, I love studs, i love them in all colours, shapes and sizes. But guess what…I can’t wear them! How cruel is the universe. I get very sore ears, even with precious metals. How annoying is that.

A pair of earrings can really set of an outfit. They can turn very ordinary, everyday wear into something a bit glam.

I made these earrings recently. I found a pair of vintage briolette earrings, in a local flea market in Tynemouth on the north east coast of the UK.

They were a pair of orange briolettes hung on sterling silver ear wires. The silver wires were not suitable for wear and so I thought I would rework them into a pair of briolette earrings with a modern vintage twist.

I took the brioletttes, which hung from a sterling silver chain and cleaned the chain up. I then hung them, again from some new sterling silver ear wires, making them wearable. I then made some silver hearts using polymer metal clay (PMC, 99% silver). I hammered the hearts and gave them a slightly distressed look. I then hung, on each earring, a silver heart, partially hidden by the briolette.

If only I could wear them.

Vintage briolette earrings

Button Stud Spiral Earrings with an Anglo Saxon Twist

Lynwood Jewels likes to keep on top of trends but we also like to put our own twist on them. We have created a range of earrings to celebrate the return to fashion of the button stud earring, but with a  twist of Anglo Saxon. The Anglo Saxons often used a geometric design which was based on tightly swirled gold, bronze or silver which formed a spiral.

This image of a celtic cross, shows the type of design I am talking about:

Celtic cross showing spiral design

Close up of spiral design

Using this idea we have created these stud earrings from sterling silver wire work, soldered onto a sterling silver ear post. Hope you like them, you can get them in our shop now:

Button Stud Spiral earrings

Sci Fi Earrings Project

I recently sold my ‘Satellite of Love’ necklace (shown below) and needed to make some matching earrings. So I have recorded how I made those, so you can see the process.

First of all, let me show you the necklace:

Sci-Fi necklace Satellite of Love

I decided that the earrings should be based on the pendant of the necklace, i.e. a hoop with discs attached  – the pendant part can be seen in the image above.

These are the steps taken to create the earrings (all parts are sterling silver):

Step 1: Create the circle using 1.2mm sterling silver wire by wrapping it something a suitably sized and circular – in his case I used a bottle top

Step2: I then cut the silver so the ends overlapped by about 4cm and using round nose pliers I curved two loops going in opposite directions at the ends of the wire

Step3: I then grasped each end together using the loops to close the circle:

Step 4: I then hammered out the wire hoop to flatten the edges so that I could solder the discs onto the ear hoop  – I repeated this to create the matching ear hoop:

Step 5: I then created 3 different size sterling silver discs for each hoop. To do this I used a disc cutter to create the discs.

Step 6: I then decided where on the hoop the discs would be positioned:

Once I had the position right, I moved onto the next stage soldering the piece together

Step 7: To solder the discs onto the hoop I had to prepare the hoop and the discs by dipping them into boric acid solution to prevent fire stain occurring and painting a solution of flux to help with the solder process.

Step 8: I then added hard solder pallions to the hoop and sweat soldered the pallions.

Step 9: I carefully added the silver discs on top of the sweated pallions of solder and heated the disc up to red hot. This melted the pallion and the disc was then firmly soldered to the hoop

Step 10: I then had to clean the soldered piece by quenching in cold water and pickling in a 10% sulphuric acid solution around 70 centigrade for 20 minutes.

Step 11: I cleaned the freshly pickled earrings using wire wool and soap

step 12: Finally to complete the earrings I added a sterling silver ear wire using a split ring to the loop made in step 2 above.