Leather and Bead Earrings

I have a large back of leather cord scraps and I wanted to make an easy earring with them. After looking around, I found that I could use leather cord, some beads, and a flat head pin to make an easy and fun pair earring. The pair I made was long because I like them long, but you can make these as short or as long as you want, it will all depend on what pins you can find.

*Earrings are hanging on my 3D printed earring display.

Instructable 334

Supplies:

• Flat Head Pin about 3" long, you can use shorter your earring will just be shorter and you won't need as long of leather or as many beads
• 2 Leather strips that are about 1/8" wide and at least 6" long each
• Small beads (I used 28, 14 for each earring) that fit on your pin and go with your leather - should be about the same width as the leather
• Earrings - you might want surgical steel, I've had bad experiences with dark leather touching sterling silver so just keep this in mind when you pick out the leather, I didn't worry about it this time since the leather was white

Tools:

• Round Nose Jewelry Pliers
• Awl or other pointy tool - I'm using a pointy clay tool because it's what I have
• Scissors
• Measuring Tape

*Links are Amazon Associates links.

First, you need to figure out roughly how far apart you need your holes.

To start, carefully cut the end of the leather strip so it's rounded and neat. Then stab a hole in the center of the end, try to not get the hole too close to any edge or it will tear.

Once you have your hole, slid it onto one of your pins (I slid it to the end but you don't need to do that yet).

Now thread on a bead.

Fold the strip over the end of the beed (picture 6) and figure out where the next hole needs to be.

Poke the hole and thread it on the pin to make sure it fits well.

Now that you've done the first holes, you can take your leather strip off and figure out how far apart you need the holes. This distance will depend on your leather strip thickness and bead thickness. Mine was roughly a little longer than 3/8" and I had 15 holes.

The easiest way to proceed is to poke all the holes you need and thread it all together at once. If you are unsure of your measuring skills you can do one hole at a time.

*the biggest danger of pre-poking all the holes is if they are too close to each other, this won't work and you'll have to start over

Make sure you make the holes a little further apart rather than too close as if they are too close you won't be able to thread it at all, but if they are a little further apart you'll still be able to proceed.

Once you have all the holes poked, you can thread the leather, then a bed, then fold over the leather and stab through it, then a bead, etc.

Go until you have about 1/4" left on the pin so you can make the loop. You can make it as short as you want.

When you get to the end, carefully cut the end of the strip rounded so it looks nice like the beginning.

Since you'll need two earrings, make sure you do both leather strips. As long as you know one is right you can use it to get the holes right on the second one.

Time to finish off the earring.

Take your round nose pliers and carefully bend a loop at the end of your pin.

Hook this onto your earring and you're done!

Enjoy your earrings.