Paper Quilled Teardrop Earrings – Free Pattern

One of the best things about making paper quilled jewelry is that as long you have a wide variety of paper you can make a piece of jewelry to match any outfit!

This year for the Indian celebration of Deepavali (Diwali) my daughter Svara and I had new outfits, but no matching jewelry!  Luckily I got a head start a week before Deepavali and was able to complete two sets of jewelry for her and a pair of earrings for myself.

Today I am going to share with you the earrings that I made for myself.  I don’t have a picture tutorial to share, but I will share the pattern.  If you are familiar with my other patterns you will be able to follow it to make your own pair (in any color to match your outfit!)

I used all 1/8″ (3mm) width paper for this project, but you can use any width you’d like.

Supplies You Need (for one pair of earrings):

• 2 strips of paper 24″ long (I used olive green)
• 2 strips of paper 12″ long (I used olive green)
• 6 strips of paper 6″ long (I used olive green)
• 6 strips of paper 3″ long (I used black with gold edge)
• 2 strips of paper 6″ long (I used black with gold edge)
• glue (My favorite is PPA which you can find at Custom Quilling, or here on Amazon)
• Border Buddy by Quilled Creations (you can find it  on Amazon)
• The end of a small aluminum quilling tool (find it  on Amazon, or at Custom Quilling)
• sealant for making your earrings water resistant (click here to read more about different sealants)
• 2 small jump rings (mine are 3mm inner diameter)
• 2 medium jump rings (mine are 4mm inner diameter)
• 2 earring hooks

Instructions:

• Use the 24″ strips of paper and wrap them around the biggest layer of your border buddy.  Pinch them into teardrop shapes.  If you don’t have a border buddy, use any object that is approximately 1 1/8″ (2.8cm) in diameter.  (click here to learn how to use the border buddy)
• Glue the 6″ strips of green paper to the 3″ strips of black/gold edge paper.
• Glue the 12″ strips of green paper to the 6″ strips of black/gold edge paper.
• Use the end of the aluminum quilling tool to wrap all of the other strips. (see this post for pictures of how to do that) So you should have six smaller open circles and two larger ones.  Pinch four of the smaller ones into teardrops and the two larger ones as well.  That leaves two in circles.  If you don’t have the aluminum tool you can use a small barreled pen or the end of the circle border buddy.  The aluminum tool is approximately 4.5mm or 3/16″ in diameter
• Glue the pieces inside of the large teardrops as shown in my design.  I dab a very little bit of glue on the parts that I know are touching something.
• Use a sealant to make your jewelry sturdy and water resistant.  For this pair I experimented with using only diamond glaze.  Usually I use a liquid sealer as the base coat and then something like diamond glaze as a top coat.  This time I only used diamond glaze.  I found that it gave a good coat.  It is not as hard as it would be if I used the liquid sealer first, it is more flexible, but it’s definitely enough of a coat to be waterproof.  To put the sealant on this piece I squeezed some onto a plastic surface and used a small paintbrush to paint it on all surfaces. I added the earring hooks before applying the sealant so that I could do both sides at once and hang it up to dry.  Find diamond glaze, at Scrapbook.com, Blue Moon Scrapbooking, or on Amazon

This makes for a medium size pair of earrings I’d say.  You can certainly adjust the size as desired by using a smaller step on the border buddy, or a larger item that you have around such as the bottom of a bottle.   Be creative!

Stick around and check out some of the other fun stuff on the blog!

Click here to view more free paper quilling tutorials!

Click here to view paper quilling tips and tricks!

Click here to view a list of places to buy quilling supplies around the world!

Click here to view some of my own quilling projects, with tips so you can make your own if you’d like!

*All products and supplies mentioned in this post I purchased and/or made on my own.

*This post contains some affiliate links, and some non affiliate links.  If you purchase products through the affiliate links I get a small percentage (at no extra cost to you!).  I only link to products that I believe in and/or love to use myself.  Thank you for supporting my blog!