Like a lot of crafters, I have an excess of crafty things laying around my house. Lately, I've been trying to work my way through unfinished projects and extra materials I have. I also recently got 2nd ear piercings so I've been very excited to make myself some earrings that will fit in normal ear holes! (I have my original ear piercings stretched a bit, so normal piercings fall right out.) So combine trying to use up crafting materials with the need for new earrings, and that equates to me making over 20 different types of earrings in one day. After the first few ones I decided I should document the making of them!
Here are some of the materials I used in the beginning. As I went on I slowly added more and more out of necessity.
Materials pictured are:
- Super Sculpey
- black permanent marker
- metallic pigment
- a sharp blade
Materials not pictured:
- earring posts
- eye pins or head pins
- needle nose pliers
- glitter
- nail polish top coat
- two part epoxy glue
At this point, I knew I wanted to make some pointy black earrings. Unfortunately I could only dig up my skin colored sculpey, so after researching online for a little bit, I saw that some people colored their clay with permanent markers. I figured I could give it a try!
I flattened out the clay and colored it black.
Then I just worked the clay until it was a solid color. I repeated this process until it was as dark as I wanted.
Here's the final color compared to the original skin colored clay. Pretty drastic change! I have to say, this method worked out very, very well. Will use again!
Now I'll do a play by play of how I made the earrings~
I cut equal parts of the clay and rolled it into spikes.
Using a sharp blade, I cut the top at an angle.
I made a few of these and I highlighted the flat area with various things like glitter and metallic pigments.
The lid had plenty of pigment on it, so I just rubbed the flat area around on it.
Ta da! I had to do the glittery ones after baking, so you shall see those in a few pictures.
I wanted to make some ombre earrings, so I just dipped the ends into the pigment, and using my fingers I smoothed and faded it out.
Ta da!
I wanted to make dangly earrings, but I only had earring posts like these:
So I had to be inventive. I figured I could take a small amount of clay and some open eye pins and make little studs that I could attach the dangly part off of.
Unfortunately I only had head pins. So I had to make my own open eye pins. Also, since the studs were going to be so small and I wanted to make sure the pin would stay, I made figure 8 shapes out of the pins and squished then into a small ball of clay.
Like so. Then I squished it onto the earring post to make the back of it flat.
I ended up baking them like this to make sure they'd stay flat and then carefully popped the posts off and reattached them with glue.
Anyway, after making all my random clay pieces, I threw them in the oven to bake. According to my clay I baked them at 275F for 15 minutes.
Done baking! Also, the picture quality after baking kind of suffered because a storm decided to blow in and engulf all the nice natural sunlight that is the key to taking awesome pictures. Now, I love me some good thunderstorms, but only when I'm not trying to take photos for my blog!
After baking, I took a paper towel and rubbed off the excess pigment. I originally intended to seal these pieces with a clear acrylic sealer, but I couldn't find my sealer(I must have left it back in Texas :( ) and they actually don't rub off any pigment at all after taking the excess off. I also ended up liking the matte-ness that the black clay ended up getting after baking as well.
As promised, here is the glittering.
I basically just painted top coat nail polish onto the area I wanted glittered (here being the flat part) and then dunked it into the glitter. I used my finger to gently pat the glitter flat and into the to coat and tapped off the excess. I repeated this process with the black glitter. After they dried, I glued on the earring posts using this fella:
A two part epoxy glue. A little goes a long way, especially with earrings (even with the mass quantity I did) but it does set quite fast so you have to work quickly. I ended up having to mix up about 3 different small batches of glue to do all these suckers.
Here they are all glued up! After curing for a few minutes they were set enough for me to attach the dangly earrings together, and I was done! Woo hoo!
(Note: you may notice the ombre spikes I made for the dangly earrings here in the front right of the picture. I forgot to mention that before baking, I made eye pins for them and stuck them in. Then, after baking, just to be sure they would stay in place, I took the pin out, dipped it in the epoxy glue and stuck it back in. I've had problems before with polymer clay jewelry slipping off of straight pins after baking, so I like to do this just to ease my mind.)
And these are some of them completed! I wanted to display them on my ears, but they're still healing so I can't take out the studs for a little while. So my hands will just have to do instead. And in the mean time I get to stare at these guys every day until my ears are healed!
Here are two dangly ones. I actually love how they all turned out and I can't wait until I can wear them!