How To Make Feather Earrings

Feather earrings are the newest trend. I'm starting to see them everywhere - and why not? They're a great way to add some flair.

And the best part? They're easy to make, and feathers are cheap, cheap, cheap!

You will need:

A special kind of crimp (see above) - the kind used on the ends of cotton cord. I'll update with a link to a site where you can buy these.

Feathers

Earring wires or clips

Needlenose pliers

Scissors

Step One: Put together the feathers

Find a combination of feathers you like, and make sure you have enough similar feathers to make a double of it.

Step Two: Crimp It

Holding the feathers firmly, place the open crimp at the top of the feathers. Make sure that all the stems are in the crimp, and that none stick out the end. If you need to trim the ends with scissors to achieve this, do so.

Making sure that the feathers don't shift away from where you want them, fold one side of the crimp in and over the stems with needle-nosed pliers, pressing firmly. Then fold the other side of the crimp over as well.

Step Three: Repeat.

Do the same thing all over again to create the second earring.

Step Four: Attach ear wires.

This is pretty basic... just remember to twist open the earring loops and you should be fine. Make sure the front of the feathers is facing the right direction.

Et Voila!

Obviously, I didn't follow my own advice about making sure you have enough of the same type of feathers.

Enjoy!

This is the easy & quick way to make these earrings. There's another way that looks better but requires more work. I'll be posting a tutorial with that method soon.

Great White Balance Tutorial

Just a quick post to share something really useful...

I found this awesome tutorial on finding the correct white balance in camera every time - essential for taking good product photos. Thanks to COLOURLovers for turning me on to it!

http://photo.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-get-white-balance-correct-in-camera-every-time/

Great advice, simple to implement. Hope you find it useful!

How to Make Action Figures Into Charms

Ok, this isn't what I planned to write for my next tutorial, but I'm putting a bunch of ninja earrings and necklaces in my shop very soon, so I figured I might as well photograph the process and make it a tutorial!

You will need:

• A thumbtack
• A headpin
• A small action figure, probably rubber or a plastic that isn't too hard or brittle.
• Glue, if your action figure isn't rubber.
  
• Jewelry pliers - it doesn't really matter which kind, even crimping pliers would probably work.
  

Step One: Get your ninja!


I'm using ninjas in this tutorial... I have them in 8 different colors and 12 different poses. LOL.

Step Two: Find the center of the ninja's head.

You want to find the point that's above the neck, because you want the hole we're going to be poked to poke down into the neck and not to come out under his chin.


Step Three: Poke Him!


Step Four: Poke him again! This time with the headpin. You might need to trim the headpin down a little.

Push the pin in with the pliers.

Step Five: Voila! Admire your new pendant or charm.


If your action figure wasn't made of rubber, which will tighten down over the headpin, glue the headpin in.

This also works great with those cute Japanese erasers!



And the little pop-top containers from the 25-cent machines that the ninjas come in are great packaging for small items!

These are a pair of earrings I just made that I will be listing on the shop as soon as possible. There's a matching ring, too! =D

How to Take Apart a Book Without Ripping the Pages

This may not seem like the most useful skill right now, but just wait until I put up all the different things you can make with these pages - you won't want to lose a centimeter of the paper to ripping!

Ok, so first step... You Will Need:

A book you no longer want to read
and
A knife. A craft knife is probably best but a kitchen knife will work too... just any knife that's handy.

You can use any type of book, because of course thin paper book pages are useful for decoupage and other crafts, but in this tutorial and others I will be using a book with large, thick, shiny pages... a coffee-table book, essentially.

Ok. If you want to know how to take apart a book, you need to know how it's put together.

If you look at any book that's actually bound, and not just stapled together, and look closely at the paper where it meets the spine, you will see little groups of pages folded in half.

When a book is bound, a certain amount of pages are stacked, sewn down the middle, and folded in half. Then these packets are glued into the spine.

In this picture, the pages on the left have had the insides of the packets removed, leaving only the outer page of the packets, which is glued to the spine.

So step one is to find the packets in your book!

Once you do find a packet, find the inside pages of the packet - the ones not glued to the spine.



Open the book to the front or back of this inner packet, so that one of the pages you're looking at is the one glued to the spine, and one of them is the front or back page of the inner packet.



Taking your knife, run it along the crease where the pages meet.


This will cut the threads that hold the inner packet to the outer pages. It may help if you grip the inner packet and pull with one hand and use the knife with the other. I'd show this in my pictures but I'm using the other hand to hold the camera, lol.




Soon you should be able to pull the inner packet away. Open the inner packet.


The pages in the packet should come apart very easily, as the threads holding them together have already been cut.



Et voila! Beautiful, unripped pages twice as big as if you'd ripped them out!

Coming up next... what the heck to do with them!