Lend me your ears

Warning: making bead earrings is dangerously addictive. Fortunately, it's not too expensive.

The feature photo shows my other earring kit. Not only was I just as delighted with it as I was with the wreath ones, but it also gave me a nifty little feature that I could also use for the wreath-style earrings. You see where the beadwork connects to the loop at the base of the earwire? That's a tiny loop of 15/0 seed beads (which, to give you some idea, are about the size of a chia seed). Much easier and more satisfying than trying to shove a jump ring through your topmost bead.

By this time I'd got the bug, so I made these:

These were specifically made to go with my scuba Southbank, which is black with a red and olive print. Notice that in this light, the 11/0 seed beads (that is, the slightly larger seed beads, which you can see all over the design but most notably round the edges between the relatively big olive glass pearls) look bottle green. These are very, very weird beads. The colour is called "Orion", and I bought them thinking they were a dark red. They are... in certain lights, and also depending very much on what you put them with. In these particular earrings, they're kind of quantum, flipping back and forth between dark red and bottle green depending on the light and, I suspect, what they happen to feel like. I wouldn't often want to use beads that can't make up their mind what colour they are, but these do, I have to admit, work well here. And, as you see, I made the bead loops to hang them on the wires. I've been doing that from this point on.

These are just incredibly satisfying to make. I won't go into all the details because they're copyright, but you can probably see for yourself that the central ring is made from long two-hole beads separated by pairs of seed beads (specifically they're 11/0s - this design uses a lot of them), and then you have larger beads round the outside of the ring. The larger faceted beads (haematite-style on the left, clear peridot on the right) are 3 mm Czech firepolish beads; you might remember I rather balked at the price of the 2 mm ones, but the 3 mm ones are extremely reasonable. The round ones are 4 mm Czech glass pearls. And you do this thing where you start by adding the firepolish beads with half of a "cradle" made from seed beads, then you make the second halves of all the "cradles" between the other side of the centre ring and the firepolish beads... and then you add the glass pearls, with a 15/0 seed bead on each side, which you string between the firepolish beads and they just seat themselves ever so neatly in their "cradles". I get such a sense of satisfaction out of it every time. It must have taken either a lot of playing about or some serious mathematics to work it out in the first place, possibly a bit of each. These beads are all different sizes but they just fit together with no gaps or bumps.

Now, I was not originally going to make any more of the star earrings, because those oval beads in the centre are Lipsi beads from the Par Puca range, and Spoilt Rotten have discontinued all the Par Pucas. But then I thought... well, they're very nice earrings, and in any case the Par Pucas they have left are half price. So I did, in the end, get some more, resulting in these two:

Oddly enough, the pair on the left is more or less what I originally thought I'd bought. The photos of the gold ones on the website didn't really work well. Having said that, I do really like the gold ones too! These, as well as the Lipsis, use SuperDuo beads (the larger cousins of the MiniDuos which form the central ring of the wreath earrings), Preciosa bicones, 3 mm bugle beads, and the inevitable 11/0 and 15/0 seed beads. I had seen two-hole beads before, but I couldn't think what one would use them for... and now I'm using them all the time.

And then, on Easter Sunday, I had an inspiration. There was quite a lot going on on that day (we had a really lovely outdoor service, since the school where we usually meet was closed; and we had perfect weather for it - the rain very obligingly held off till Easter Monday), so I made only one pair of earrings, and it was this pair. This time you get to see one of them under construction:

There is a reason why I took a photo at precisely this point. It was the point where the inspiration hit me.

Look at the 4 mm glass pearls in the section marked "D" in the photo. These are standard-issue Czech glass pearls in a shade called Frosted Red, and when they arrived I was initially a bit disappointed with them because they weren't as red as I'd hoped. Next to them, in section "E", we have Toho 11/0 seed beads (they're Japanese, but they are actually the same people as Mill Hill, of whom you may have heard) in a shade called Milky Pomegranate. It's not quite so obvious seeing them in the adjacent compartments because of the light, but when you see them together in the finished earring, you can see that they exactly match. (Incidentally, the firepolish beads in this one are crystal AB; I very nearly used garnet, as I did in the red and olive earrings, but decided at the last minute that that would be a bit too much, and it was a good call.)

And I thought... you know what? That was pure fluke. But all Spoilt Rotten would have to do would be to link them and say "these beads match". It would take all the guesswork out of choosing beads. It's not quite so important for reds because there aren't so many shades, but there are any number of greens, and blues too for that matter; I have a tendency to buy green beads now and again and just hope they match, or at least co-ordinate with, something I've already got. I am particularly fond of the grass/emerald, peridot, and olive areas of the green part of the spectrum... but the pictures don't always tell an accurate story. So I e-mailed them to suggest that they might like to make their already pretty amazing site even better.

Of course, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "just how many earrings can one person wear?" The answer to that is "certainly not as many as I can potentially make". Hence the title. I will be most delighted to make some of these beautiful and unique earrings as gifts for anyone who wants them. I mean, I suppose I could even sell them on Etsy if I wanted, but it seems like a lot of hassle; it's awkward for me to get to the post office (it's in the next village and I can't get my scooter inside, so I have to grab hold of the fixtures and fittings). And, also, with the beads I don't use for earrings, I can make necklaces, and spectacle chains, and other fun things of that sort.

It's been nearly a year and Porthos still hasn't noticed I've had my ears pierced. I bet he will now!