As you may know, we recently moved to a new house. Its been fun to discover which plants lay below the surface in our new gardens. Much to our delight, red tulips appeared in the early spring. I've named today's earrings in their honor.
The ceramic discs and beads are from
Suburban Girl Studio. The discs are glazed around the rims and have a hole in the middle. I decided to fill the center hole with flower beads.
Because I was filling the hole with beads, I had to come up with an alternative method of hanging them from the ear wires. This required a little mechanical engineering. Several of my initial tries weren't strong enough and the discs flopped forward. Here's a view from the back showing what I finally came up with.
I placed the flower on a headpin, and then added a 4mm red fire polish bead. Although the bead doesn't show, it fills up the hole and stabilizes the flower. After the fire polish bead, I made a wrapped loop. Using a heavy gauge headpin, I added two size 8 seed beads, the wrapped loop and four more seed beads. Then I added a spacer and the red ceramic bead. I wrapped the top loop snugly and wrapped down around the top of the bead, to strength to the construction.
I think the Red Tulips will be fun to wear all summer!
