How to Make 2 Pairs of Quick & Easy Earrings with Charms

Hi this is Julie with beadaholique, and in this video I’m going to show you some recent additions to our charm collection and at the end of the video I’m going to show you how to make two different pairs of earrings using charms.

Most of the charms you see here are lead-free pewter and they are antique silver plate and antique gold plate and there’s some really fun designs so we’ve got this one here which I love. This is a origami fortune teller, really cool design and would look great just hung from a jump ring and then placed on a premade chain. These are great little pave crystal charms, nice to add to a bracelet or again a premade chain. Bicycles, I want to show you they look great on both sides. Little teapots and they stand up and then here we have some nice spiritual charms. And travel charms with the Eiffel Tower and the fleur del is. Holiday charms, we’ve got a great spider web and this one actually has two loops on it so you can make that into a pretty easy necklace if you want to, or you can just snip off one of the loops and make it into a charm.

Some nautical, here we’ve got the anchor and the starfish, a little pistol. Now these are great, these are just little spikes and there are little pendants which is great, you could put a lot of them on a single design or just use one on a nice kitty, a tool. Here we have some elements from the periodic table, a biohazard sign, a little chemistry beaker and then some nice solid hearts as well. And these actually have a curve to them which is really interesting and something that I haven’t seen before in a charm like that. Then over here I’ve got some fleur de lis in the silver and the gold. And these little cute robots as well and the silver and the gold. And these are the ones I want to turn into earrings. So I’m going to take this fleur de lis charm and you can see it’s got two loops. Now if you don’t want both loops, just snip off one of them. But in this case we are going to use both loops. And then I’m going to use this earring hook which actually already has a pretty little pink bead added to it and then some Czech glass crystal beads and a couple of head pins, we’re going to make a pair of earrings with those. And then with the robots we’re just going to use these little three quarter inch hoops.

I’m going to bring out my tools, you’re going to need a pair of chain nose pliers, round nose or wire looping pliers and a cutter and this is going to be for the fleur de lis earrings. So let’s start by going ahead and placing our bead onto the head pin. And then we’re going to just create a simple wire loop which is so easy with these wire looping pliers. So I’m just grabbing the wire and squeezing my pliers which does half of the work for me and then I’m just going to bring that wire around, rotate my pliers up top and then finish my loop and then right where the wire criss-crosses, I’m going to make a cut. And I’m going to do that with my other bead as well. These are so quick to make that you can definitely make many of these in an hour if you were wanting to make gifts. You could probably make a good, maybe 20 of these plus in an hour. Very quick and easy.

Okay now we’re going to go ahead and just open that loop, the same way we would open a jump ring. So we’re taking our chain nose pliers and I’m just going to twist that loop open, slide it on to the bottom loop of the fleur de lis. You can twist a little bit here, there we go. And then close it back up, you can put any beads you want of course at the bottom here. I’m going to do the same with the other one. Open it up, slide it on, close it back up and then we’re going to go to our earring hook, we’re going to open the loops at the base of the hook. Same exact technique and just slide on our fleur de lis charm and close it. And do the same for the other one, and close it. So we have a really pretty pair of earrings using the fleur de lis charms and they were very quick to make.

So that’s one way you can use these charms now, now another option are these little hoops and of course there’s a bunch of different size of hoops available. And these are beautiful earring hoops so it has a nice straight edge wire right here that we can slide the charm on or bead. So we’re just going to go ahead and slide on or little robot, now there is a right and wrong side of the robot so here you see his little eyes and detailing. And on the back is finished but of course he doesn’t have eyes on the back so we’ll make sure we slide that guy on facing forward. So since this the part that’s going to go through our ear we want him to face forward and then to finish this, all we have to do is bend up the end. So just bend it up a notch and you see right here that’s what’s going to go through your ear and then it’s going to go ahead and link into their little hole on the other side like so. To close it and then to make the other one. Of course you just do the exact same technique and you have a complete pair of these cute little robot earrings. And of course you can choose any charm you want to do these. You can find all of these charms and many more available at beadaholique dot com. 

Custom Made Australian Jewellery - Fraser Ross - Chain Me Up

Who is Fraser Ross?

Fraser Ross (as we are now known) began trading online jewellery in July 2010 under the business name Chain Me Up. Today, some 7 years later Chain Me Up is both our registered trademark and the domain where we host our online store – Fraser Ross Jewellery

Ross was working for a gold and silver chain manufacturer on Queensland’s Gold Coast in the early 2000’s and had many requests from friends to supply them with quality solid gold chains at a price they couldn’t get in a retail jewellery store. With a long history in IT, it became apparent that the skills learned would be very useful in creating an online business and the contacts at the manufacturer guided him towards creating a jewellery store.

The manufacturer was able to custom make any of their gold and silver chains to any length for Ross and this gave him the key difference to the major retailers, who generally only sell what they keep in stock. Being able to provide customers with exactly the length of chain that they really wanted and in a reasonable time frame helped launch the business to a successful beginning.

Although custom made chains are the foundation upon which the business was built, it soon became clear that now the store had launched it was going to require a much wider range of products. We sought out a manufacturer for producing silver and gold charms to order and quickly formed a relationship with a small Australian business and that relationship is still going strong some 7 years later.

One of the main objectives of running this business was to only sell Australian made jewellery and in the early years we were able to meet this desire. Since we launched our own business, a number of manufacturers in Australia have closed down or sold out to overseas interests. This has made it much harder to keep our range of products exclusively Australian made, in fact there are some pieces that are simply not manufactured here and we do now source some jewellery from overseas manufacturers. Despite not being able to sell exclusively Australian jewellery, we have managed to keep our overseas goods to just 5% of our complete range.

As with our chains, our full range comprising more than 4600 charms can all be made in silver, yellow gold or rose gold and over 4000 of these charms are also available in white gold. A choice of findings (fittings) allows our charms to be for connected to existing traditional bracelets, to wear as earrings or pendants and fit to Pandora style snake chain bracelets using sliders. Selecting a parrot clasp even lets you easily swap charms from one bracelet to another in no time.

The past 7 years have seen many changes as shopping cart software has become much more complex and functional. Where functionality was missing, Ross has re-coded sections of the cart software to achieve results that otherwise would not have been possible. The difficulty of bulk updating prices, images and product descriptions was solved by Ross developing SQL statements to fully automate the processes that would otherwise take many hours of work.

Back when we first started people only viewed web sites on their computers, often over a dial up modem connection. High speed broadband and mobile telephones and tablets meant a complete redesign of our website to cater for this new technology. Our store is now based on a system called bootstrap that allows for beautiful design and outstanding functionality. Being responsive, it changes the layout of our thousands of web pages to best suit the many different screen layouts. Who knows what further developments will need to be considered in the next 7 years?

As well as being in charge of the technical side of our business, Ross has also started creating the first designs in our handmade range of jewellery. Currently a small range of sterling silver earrings and bracelets, but destined to grow into the future. Quality not quantity was the primary concern, so every link in every design is argon pulse welded to ensure the jewellery will be around for many years and won’t fall apart if you catch it on your clothing.