What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor?... OR... Wood Earrings Challenge Accepted!

Yeah, there's no drunken sailor... but I made you look! (That song has been stuck in my head for days, so now it's stuck in yours. You're welcome.) 

I have 4 different jewelry projects going on at once. When I have a new idea I drop everything to make it. It's a problem. It drives me crazy. It's who I am. This project, however, is one that I COMPLETED! 

I have a big old pile of these (above) wood earring blanks, so I've created a challenge for myself: See how many completely different styles of earrings I can create using the same wooden blanks. I accept my own challenge! 

For this set of 6 earrings I started by staining the backs a nice warm color. I don't want to mask the fact that these earrings are wood, I want to highlight it.

Once again I am using monoprints that I made several years ago. I have a huge stack of beautiful prints that do such a great job of providing pops of color so why not plaster them on EVERYTHING? 

I've had the idea to use pure copper foil as an overlay for a while and this seemed like the perfect project to try it out. I am over the moon with the results. 😍

Once the foil was in place I added some depth and more color with colored pencils and painted the edges. 4 coats of satin polyurethane sealed the deal. Literally.

For years I have made all my earwires from sterling silver wire but with the outrageous cost of silver these days I am putting a hold on my silver purchases. I simply cannot justify that expense and there's no way I'm passing that cost on to customers. Especially when I can make awesome things for a FRACTION of the cost without sacrificing one damn bit of artistic wowness (new word alert!). So, I made these earwires from silver plated, nickel free wire and blinged them up with a cute little metal enameled bead. 

The result is a beautiful batch of lightweight, colorful earrings! I'm thrilled with the copper and will definitely be trying this technique on other things. My creative juices are FLOWING. I was going to put them in my online shop (this one) but ran into a few snags that I just don't have the bandwidth to deal with right now. It's been a while since I paid any attention to my shop and in the meantime they have changed a few things so I need to relearn how to list things and tweak a few settings. UGH. I hate technology. If anyone is interested in purchasing a pair they are $35 plus shipping. Just reach out to me on Instagram or Facebook (or text if you know me). 😊