Earrings have been an important part of our outfits ever since the ancient Egyptians, if not more. They are accessories that complete our looks, either by matching our clothes or creating contrast with them.
Jewels made of precious stones or metals have always been the most popular, but nowadays almost any material and design can be used for making earrings or necklace pendants.
Haven’t you seen those plastic earrings resembling spray cleaners? We don’t even know why those are popular, but if you are not into such an extravagant fashion, take a look at the following clay earring ideas to make on your own.
DIY clay earring ideas
There are many different materials that can be used for making earrings, e.g., plastic, wood, metal, or polymer clay. In the Y2k (2000) fashion, you could even see girls wearing bottle caps or soda tabs, and, nowadays, all kinds of objects can be miniaturized with a 3D printer and hung in a pendant.
But if you want something more fancy and not so exotic, you can get your own clay earrings. These can be homemade earrings, or you can buy them from any local small business.
There are several different designs you can choose from. There are little figurines of characters, food, flowers, or anything you want to make in miniature size, or you can make geometrical or abstract figures with different “prints”.
In case you want to do them yourself, here’s how to make clay earrings at home:
What you’ll need:
- Polymer clay
- Acrylic paint
- Cutting and modeling tools
- Plastic wrap
- Hook base
- Rolling pin
- Anything you want to add, as gold leaf, glitter, pigments, etc.
- Clay shape cutters
Making figurine earrings
If this is your first time modeling polymer clay, you may want to start with something easy, so let’s make some flowers. Separate a piece of polymer clay and apply some yellow acrylic paint to it.
Pick a bigger portion of clay and tint it in white. Although the clay is already whitish, you want to apply some paint on it as, after drying, the clay will turn somewhat transparent instead of keeping the white color.
Make 6 tiny balls with white clay and one with yellow clay. You decide how big you want each flower to be. Assemble the flower using white as the petals and yellow as the center.
If you feel confident, you can use a ball tip tool to press the petals a little bit and give them a more three-dimensional aspect.
When the flower is finished and the clay hasn’t hardened yet, grab an earring hook base and insert it in the back of the flower to assemble the earring itself.
With some practice, you can make different types of figurines which are more complex, and you can also paint the details after you have finished modelling.
Making printed clay earrings
If you want to make some fancier earrings that you can even use in formal events, you may want to create some geometrical shapes with a printed design. With some practice, you can even make earrings that look like expensive marble jewelry.
How to make clay earrings with a marble effect
For this type of print, choose several acrylic colors that resemble those of marble stone. These can be white, gray, soft pink, o purple. In this case, we recommend also getting gold leaf to give it a nice touch.
Grab a considerable amount of clay and tint it in white. After that, separate it into smaller pieces and paint them with the other colors. Mind that I didn’t say tint, but paint.
You don’t want your clay to absorb the paint, but to be halfway mixed and mostly on the surface. You can now incorporate some gold leaf now, again, making sure it’s not fully mixed into the pieces.
Make a ball with all the colors, again, not mixing them, but keeping them in chunks. Press them to form a cube of colored sections and cut it into thin slices. The idea is that each slice will come out as a heterogeneous layer of marble-like clay.
Now, this is one of the bases you can use for printed earrings. Before assembling the earrings themselves, let’s see how to make other print patterns.
How to make flower-patterned earrings
Using the same technique we mentioned before for making flowers, make several teeny tiny flowers in all the colors you want. They can all be the same or different, that’s up to you.
Choose another color for the background and tint a chunk of clay. Once the color is evenly distributed, use the rolling pin to extend and flatten this clay, but not fully.
When the clay is some millimeters thicker than you want it to be, palace the flowers on top, creating a pattern, and continue rolling the pin on top, to merge the flowers into the background.
Make sure to roll back and forth, but also side to side to make sure the flowers don’t look stretched up. This is a second type of base to make printed earrings.
Of course, you can make it with flowers or any other design you want, following the same instructions.
Assembling the printed earrings
Before the clay is dry, use it as a canvas and cut into different shapes. Squares, circles, triangles, any of them is good.
Pierce the hook base through them to turn them into earrings and let them dry overnight, and you are ready! If you want your pendants to be shiny, apply some clear paint coat once everything is fully dry.
Here you have a quick guide with three easy clay earring ideas you can make at home without much difficulty and with just a few ingredients. Seeing how pretty your own creations look will only make you happy but also proud!