Amazing What You Can Do With Beads!

This is a beaded garland that I finished up about 3 weeks ago.  It just sold at the local gift shop.  It's approximately 4 feet long, with a mix of brightly colored beads spun on craft wire.  The embellishments range from french beaded flowers to Swarovski crystal dragonflies and lots of stuff in between.  It's a great way to let your imagination loose.  The woman who bought this is using it on her Christmas tree this holiday season and then will use it in her sun room, looped and swagged in front of the windows so the crystals catch the light.

Earrings!

A few easy-to-make earrings created by yours truly. All of these have hand-made earwires. Making earwires is easy. I would strongly suggest that you never buy another earwire, since you can make them yourself much more cheaply.

 All you need is wire, pliers, a mandrel (I use both of the ones shown in the link image and they are well worth the money), a bench block or steel block for hammering. Make sure your block is smooth and free of gouges. If yours is like mine was, you may need to use an angle-grinder to get it back to smooth. More about that later!

 I also suggest using a rawhide mallet or a hard plastic mallet so you don't mar your wire. Years ago, before I bit the bullet and paid what I thought was an atrocious amount for my rawhide mallet (it's invaluable to me now), I would place a piece of suede over my findings before hammering with my chasing hammer. Still not a great way to do it. At least purchase a hard plastic mallet. Beadsmith makes one and it's very affordable. You can buy it here: Dual Head Plastic Mallet and you can also purchase replacement heads for it.  I use this for smaller items rather than trying to work small with a big rawhide mallet.  :)

These are turquoise beads with a "bezel" of 2mm sterling beads

These are copper tubes, freshwater pearls, sterling and copper beads with sterling earwires. 

These are some fun earrings I made with copper wire and garnet beads

These are freeform sterling wire earrings - not my best effort, but fun and easy to make.  They terminate in copper and garnets.  I probably should have soldered the top loop and my camera is better than the human eye, because it picks up things like cut marks made from my flush cuts.  That's a good enough reason to file and solder.  

These are twisted 18ga square sterling wire, hammered and formed (with half-round pliers), and garnet beads on pure copper head pins. 

None of these earrings required soldering, but if you want to make absolutely positive your jump rings won't come apart, you should probably hit them with a torch and solder them closed, if possible. 

I also find that when making earwires, a very easy way to smooth the "pointy" ends is with a metal nail file.  Seriously.  This actually works better for this purpose than any jeweler's file I've used. It's quick, easy, and you're not as likely to take off as much of your fingernails with it as you would a jeweler's file.  :)  

If you have a steel-shot tumbler, it's a good idea to throw all your findings in it for a bit to harden them up, especially if you're working in dead soft wire.  If you don't have one, though, you can work-harden by straightening your wire with a polishing cloth - just run it the length of your wire several times, and/or by lightly hammering when you're finished making earwires.  Jump rings and pins should be put in a tumbler or made with half-hard wire if at all possible.  

I use fine silver or Sterlium for my earwires and other findings.  Sterlium is alloyed with Germanium and doesn't show firescale the way sterling silver does.  Sterling will show firescale when heated because of the copper alloy.  You'll see a darkening after you fire it, and although pickle will remove a bit of this, you'll still be left with some dark spots.  The only time efficient way to deal with that for something as small as a finding is to tumble the item to polish it.  Fine silver won't show fire scale because there's no copper in it.  It's .999 silver which is pretty darned close to pure silver.