Hollow beads are a delight to make as they allow you to create larger pieces without the heavy weight of metal - which also, of course, helps to keep your costs down! This is the second of my classes on hollow beads, and time I'm going to show you how to make little boxes that are perfect for earrings, as you can see here, and also as beads for pendants, long necklaces and bracelets too.
As well as tips for soldering safely and getting a beautiful finish on your beads I will teach you how to attach secure earwires so that you can be confident that your finished earrings are going to last. I set myself the challenge of using silver left over from other projects for my beads, and so I'll also show you how to recycle both wire and sheet into different gauges and profiles. However, you don't have to use a rolling mill to decorate these beads - hammers and texture stamps also give beautiful results - and you can obviously buy the silver at suitable sizes rather than recycle.
I've kept the shape of the earrings simple so that we can concentrate on the techniques, but once you've mastered those techniques you'll find it easy to make ovals, teardrops and more!
The Dotty Box Earrings class is also available as part of the Intermediate Silversmithing course bundle.
2 hours 15 mins long, 15 lessons
Materials needed: approximately 0.5mm-0.7mm thick sheet metal large enough for four discs, rectangular wire, 0.8mm round wire