My go-to earrings have consistently been gold hoops for years now, having moved away from most other styles.... until I stumbled upon a Bristol based company who make statement earrings out of polymer clay, opening the floodgates to near-identical (but equally beautiful) Etsy shops. These earrings make my heart sing. David bought me a pair for Christmas which I absolutely love. After a bit of curiosity and googling, the internet reminded me about Fimo- that play-do like substance from childhood- and I asked for some for my birthday to have a go at making my own earrings. There were so many I was drooling over from Etsy shops, but at £20 each, I wasn't going to be buying them willy nilly.
There weren't that many tutorials on how to make earrings in this kind of style, they tended to stick to small flowery studs which isn't my thing. Having said that, there are actually quite a few youtube tutorials I see now having another google... not sure how I missed them.
Notions
Polymer Clay
To make the earrings I used a pack of 50 polymer clay colours (just found on amazon for £20, there are loads to choose from including cheaper options). 50 may seem a lot but they are small packets and this set was great because it had lots of nuanced shades.
Hardware
I also used a jewellery pack (amazon too) which includes jump rings, dangly earring bits (?) and other bits and bobs for jewellery, as well as stud backs. However, when I opened it up, the stud backs revealed themselves to be very small with a very long "pointy bit" and so I decided to use the dangly earrings instead as I thought these would work better.
You will need a pair of pliers to attach the hardware.
Other bits
Rolling pin/ glass (my clay set came with a nifty little one included)
Knife to cut out the shapes/biscuit cutters/other objects you can use to make shapes.
Baking paper. Oven tray. Oven.
There are so many gorgeous colours in this pack, so many great colour combinations.
Process
I already had a lot of ideas in my head and drew them out on paper to test the scale and for smoother, better shapes. At first I drew free hand on my rolled-out clay with a pencil and cut around that, but later realised it would be easier and more consistent if I cut out the paper shapes so that I could use them as templates.
Choose your colours of polymer clay, and warm them up by rolling them around in your hands.
On a sheet of baking paper, roll them out to be 1/4 inch thick. You want them to be big enough for the shape you're going to cut.
A note on thickness- my first batch were quite thin, and this makes them even more flexible once baked. So you may want to experiment with thickness and go quite thick to make a sturdier shape. This will affect baking time though.
There are lots of different things you can do here, you can marble colours together by rolling them into sausages and combining them, or you can make an ombre look by rolling colours into each other. I haven't done this yet, so kept mine either plain or made a 'terrazzo' look by shaving tiny bits of a colour off, cutting them up further if necessary and putting them on the clay. You then roll over the top to make the pieces amalgamate.
If you're cutting them out free hand with a knife, you will want to do lots of smoothing and shaping with the knife and rolling pin to get a clean shape.
Make sure you wash your hands in between handling different colours, the dye from a darker will transfer onto the ball of clay of a lighter colour.
Now you must make little holes in the earrings where the jump rings will go through. To make these I used a thick pin I had and wiggled it around to make sure it was big enough (doesn't matter if it's bigger than it needs to be). Also make sure that the other side, that sticks to the baking paper, has a big enough hole. They shouldn't be so close to the edge that they will break when you insert the ring, nor too far away that the distance is too great for the ring. This isn't too much of a problem though since you can get bigger rings, but it will change the look.
You need two holes if you are using dangly earrings and if it is a connective shape - like my circles are below- they connect to a bigger shape below them. If you are using studs, then there doesn't need to be the second hole, and if you are just having one shape as the earring, there only needs to be one hole.
Baking
There were lots of conflicting messages about baking on the internet, most people said adhere to your suppliers' instructions. My clay pack didn't really have a supplier... or a brand... or instructions... I went with about 100 degrees/ half a gas mark for 1 hour. Some blogs said higher heats for shorter times, it's up to you.
You want to make sure they don't burn (turn brown), mine didn't do this. They will get slightly darker in the oven, which is normal. If they aren't done enough, you can just bake them for longer.
One problem I have had is working out when they are baked- they do not look any different, and you can't touch them. You must let them cool properly so that they set.
Being a novice with polymer clay though, I didn't know how solid they should be. Obviously they need to hold their shape, but I wasn't expecting them to be flexible, which they are. Especially the thinner ones. The 'real'/original pink earrings I have are barely flexible, but they are quite thick and the shape is sturdier than mine. I don't know how the professionals bake them.
After my first batch, I tried to construct an earring (the pink semi circle with green circle) but as I pushed the jump ring through the parts, a bit chipped off the green circle around its hole. The jump ring was too small so I was having to put too much pressure on the clay. Seeing as it was a bit ruined, I decided to test it to see if it would break. It didn't take much to snap it in two.
What is confusing though is that after some googling, people kept talking about how it should not be 'brittle' if it is properly cooked, and that it should be flexible. Mine were not brittle, I could drop them and they wouldn't break, and they were flexible, but that didn't exlucde the fact I could break up them with my hands? Was this normal- were they properly baked? Unfortunately, I still don't have the answer. I baked this batch for longer on a low heat hoping it would help, but I didn't try to break a piece again so I don't definitively know.
I made my second batch thicker to try to avoid snappability, and bought bigger jump rings so that I could insert them with ease. I figured- they are not easily broken; if they fall out my ear they will be fine, their only weakness is if i decide to break them up with my fingers... So that is good enough to be getting on with.
Turning shapes into earrings
I used two jump ring sizes; a larger one to join two earring pieces together, and a smaller one to attach at the top of the 'top' earring piece, to which you then attach the dangly part, so it can be smaller as you're not having to attach two clay pieces which need to be given a bit of space to move.
You'll need to use the pliers to separate the jump rings wide enough so that you can put them into the holes, and then use them again to push the ring closed.
Attach all the hardware and you're ready to go! If you're making studs, you just have to superglue the stud back to the top of the clay shape and wait for it to dry.
Reflections
I loved making these earrings, it is so simple, and so fun to let your imagination take you anywhere. This is why I have ended up with 8 new unexpected pairs of earrings this week, there were just so many ideas I wanted to get out of my head and onto clay!
There is so much inspiration out there with these earrings floating all over social media. I was surprised how much I went for bright colours- but since my original pink pair I have really enjoyed being able to add a bold splash to my otherwise neutral outfits. Nothing against neutrals, I love you.
I'd really like to try some studs now I have got to grips with the process a bit, there is a craft shop nearby which sells stud backs that are a better shape; the flat circle you glue to the earring is a much wider in diameter than the ones I have.
While I like the earrings I have made, the style is quite different to the original earrings, and I think I prefer the look when made with a stud. Interestingly, I think all etsy/instragram accounts making polymer clay earrings use studs. The only drawback though is that I think they aren't as comfortable. Studs can make the earring feel heavier due to the way it's attached to you, and because of their large size they pull your lobe down and the earring sits at a slightly low angle. However, studs don't swizzle around like the dangly version!
Update
I have had a go making thicker stud earrings since, first I made this HUGE pair to go with a black-tie outfit and Atelier Brunette's Moonstone fabric:
Then I made some more which have turned out much more successful than my danglies and which I wear a lot. More successful mainly because they are less flimsy, but also because I prefer the colours and style now I've worked out what works best. A couple of my first batch earrings have broken around where the hoops attach, I've super glued them back together and they are sort of okay. These new ones are much less flexible, but if you really wanted to you could snap them... they're not invisible is what I'm saying.
I wanted to try to make something in a similar shape to my original earrings David bought me, but a little smaller. I chose my colours using Pantone's colour palette app which was really fun. The app analyses your photos and picks out certain colours that match their pantone colour spectrum. I went through some photos of my makes, fabric and generally photos of colours I liked and created several different colour palettes. I would like to build more of my makes around these palettes so that I can create a wardrobe of items that go with each other and feel in sync.
There's something so satisfying about pinning down the particular shades of colours you are drawn to and enjoy looking at, as if you're solidifying your colour identity. I haven't- but I might- use these palettes in the future when buying fabric to check that it fits in with my scheme. There will obviously be other nuances of shades and other shades not on here that I like too, but these encapsulated a lot of the shades that were popping up time and again either with me gravitating towards fabric in that colour or pinning other's makes on instagram.
I decided to make a pair of earrings informed by the colours from my green palette, and another from the pink palette. It was fun mixing a lot of colours, I used up a lot of the more nuanced shades with my first batch and they didn't have quite the colours I was after anyway.
I then made two necklaces that go with these earrings, the idea I had was to make a bead for each shade of the Pantone green/pink palette, and then line them up in the order from darkest to lightest.
The simplest way of making a necklace was to make spherical beads by rubbing a lump of clay in-between my hands, and making a hole through the middle with a very thick pin, you have to be delicate with holding the bead as you do this because you need to make sure you wiggle the pin about to get a big enough channel. I'm not a necklace person but the idea of statement beads in different hues of the same colour suddenly appealed to me. I used beautifully dyed fabric cord from a local haberdashery that looks like suede but (happily) isn't.
I made a couple of marble beads as an experiment, and made a different style of earrings using some simple hardware I found at the same craft shop.
I made a set of dangly blue earrings and necklace for my mum using the blues supplied in the packet. I used 5p and 10p coins as templates.
Threading the beads was a bit tricky as the holes were actually still quite narrow, it was hard work but I just about got through my thickest needle, as I needed the big eye to fit the cord through. A good pair of pliers is a must.
Supply links
Polymer clay https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07HB6LTVZ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_image_o08_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Jewellery hardware set
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07MNW1HWL/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_image_o08_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Extra jump rings https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07KKCQMHP/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
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