I’m not sure if it’s been mentioned on the blog at all but, behind the scenes, the team have been having a bit of a rethink about how we plan our monthly post schedule. Nothing is entirely set in stone just yet, but today I have a tutorial for you and it isn’t a Tuesday. It’s for a relatively simple pair of earrings but I hope it will give you some ideas for different ways to use bead caps.
I love these vintage tin bead caps from Lorelei Eurto. There’s so much cute detail it seems a shame to hide them away at the top of a bead, especially if another bead will be sitting directly on top of them. Here I’ve used a wooden disc as a backing so that the surface of the bead cap becomes the focal component. What other materials you use is mostly up to you. I’ve wired the cap and bead so that they have loops at the top and bottom. From the bottom loop I’ve hung a combination of czech glass beads.
The yellow flower is one of those dinky button flowers with the hole at the back. I’ve added the angel wing bead above to stop the flower twisting around. Other similar shaped beads can also do this job, for example, a large peanut bead. Of course, you may wish to hang something completely different below your bead cap link. Moving on to the cap section, I have used 26 gauge wire. This was because the hole in my wooden discs was relatively small. If your beads have larger holes then a thicker wire would be good.
I found that the best way to keep the cap centred on the wooden disc, was to start making the wraps on each side and increase the tightness in each at the same time, rather than finishing one completely before starting on the next. Once this is done, make a wrapped loop at the bottom of your cap section, adding the czech glass drop before closing the loop. Turning to the top of the earrings, I’ve added a little stack of beads.
I’ve used a large holed bone bead and a washer then added a vintage acrylic flower cap, which sits nicely in the large holes below. If you don’t have such a thing, you could try using one of those little flat-ish czech glass 5-point star flowers (this sort of thing). I then sat a little wooden seed bead in the vintage cap and made a double wrapped loop, to compensate for the finer wire. Then you just need to add your ear wire and make your second earring.
Bye for now, Claire