Tutorial Tuesday: Jewellery for beginners - Earrings

When we first got into jewellery making the web wasn't as full as it is now with helpful resources for craft lovers, and we ended up buying a rather expensive kit with a DVD.

The kit was very informative and was a great starter set, but now everyone has to watch their pennies a bit more, it would be far too much of a luxury.

So, here at Two Bird's Craft we thought we'd start making our own jewellery tutorials!

We will start you at the very beginning for those of you with no previous experience.

Today's jewellery tutorial is for a pair of simple earrings, at the bottom of the page we will list some links for you to find some supplies if you need them.

Earrings are one of the first things we made and are definitely the easiest and quickest item of jewellery to make, so let's start:

To make the earrings you will need:

Two headpins in the metal of your choice

Two earring hooks.

Beads or charms to make your earrings pretty!

Pliers - round and flat nosed and

Wire cutters.

Pliers and wire cutters are essential kit!

Thread your bead selection

Step 1:  Thread your beads onto your headpin

Cut the headpin leaving 1cm space

Step 2:  With your wire cutters, cut the headpin one 1cm away from your top bead

Step3:  Next, get your round nosed pliers and grab the headpin a mm or two above your top bead and bend the wire 90 degrees.

Use the round nosed pliers

Bend 90 Degrees at top of beads

Step 4:  Still using your round nosed pliers, use the fattest bit of the plier you can whilst stilling getting a grip on the wire and from the top twist the wire into a loop.

Make a loop

Step 5:  Now, get your earring hook and your flat and round nosed pliers.

Hold the small hook on your earring hook with your flat pliers and then open it with the round nosed ones. Then hook your headpin by the loop you created onto your earring hook. Now you just need to close the hook the same way you opened it and...voila, an earring!

Connect to your earring hook

Now you need to do that all again to make a pair!

You can you any amount of beads and charms as you like, but we recommend putting a small bead or a sead bead at the bottom of your headpin (especially if they are flat bottomed ones), so that any big beads don't fall straight off! If you're feeling adventurous, you might even want to hook a few headpins full of beads onto your earring hooks! 

We've been experimenting with mixing crochet and jewellery making together, here's one of our teeny crochet flowers looped onto the earring hook - what do you think?

Here's one we made earlier!

We hope everything in the above tutorial makes sense and you all enjoy making your earrings! If you need any help or think any pictures/instructions need improving then please get in touch!

As promised, here are some suggested websites for supplies:

Pur-ple

EP Beads

Perfect Beads

Good sellers on eBay:

0kittypink0

BeadAddicts

Woolly Wednesday: Yarn Thickness Chart

A great resource for newbie hookers...

When we were learning to crochet, we found there was a real trove of free information, patterns and tutorials to be found online. Whilst these were amazingly helpful in getting us started, there was a little confusion in using them due to the differences in terminology between UK and US patterns.

We have already covered the different stitch terms and hook sizes in tables earlier in the blog. The final hurdle was the terms for the yarns suggested at the start of the patterns. It took a while before we realised that 'DK' or 'Double Knit' yarn is the same as 'Worsted Weight' yarn over in the states! 

Here is yet another useful table to help you avoid any confusion as you get hooking.

There will be further fibre related posts each Wednesday. If you would like us to cover a particular subject one week, please comment or email us here.

Tutorial Tuesday: Crochet Flowers and more!

One of the first books we bought when learning to crochet was Cute and Easy Crochet by Nicki Trench.

The book is wonderfully laid out and easy to read and understand. The crochet terms, hook sizes and wool names are all UK terminology.

We have both made several things from the book but one of our favourites has been the crochet flowers.

These are easy to make and really add an extra something to whatever you're making. - We have used them for adornments to things like purses and gadget cases, and even made a pretty flower garland!

Here's the pattern to make these lovely little flowers, it's really quick and we've found you can use whatever wool and hook size you like - it will just mean you make different size flower!!

• Using your first colour for the inner of the flower, chain 6 then join with a slip stitch in the first chain to make a circle.
• Make 16 double crochet into the circle. Join with a slip stitch and fasten off.
• Join second colour for outer part of flower into fastened off stitch.
• *Chain 3, make 1 treble into next two stitches, chain 3, slip stitch into next stitch, repeat from * 4 more times  - this makes 5 petals.
• Pull tail to close up centre hole and sew in ends.

See, easy peasy! 

One of our favourite crochet bloggers, Lucy from Attic 24, has also written a post about a pattern in this book, you can read about that here - she, like us, can't sing this book's praises highly enough.

To end the post, here's a picture of one of our creations from the book which was easy but also very satisfying to make - a lovely crochet purse with the pretty flowers we mentioned already. 

Happy hooking!

TBC xxx