Pretty Pastel Gemstone Cluster Earrings Tutorial

Why we love this tutorial:

Who doesn’t love a good cluster?! These earrings are quite simple really, combing a normal drop earring with the cluster technique. Clustering a bunch of small beads together gives a dramatic look that we can’t get enough of! In this design, we’ve used some of our beautiful new pastel gemstone beads… how sweet are these colours together?! We’ve also dropped in a few of the new faceted glass crystals in a milky pink colour (we are loving the new range of crystals by the way – heaps of new colours, including much requested opaque colours! Check them out, here!).

Beads and Materials You’ll Need:

• Mixture of small beads (4mm to 8mm) for the cluster. Approx. 15 beads for each earring. If any of the beads below are unavailable, you can easily swap the sizes/stones around. It’s mostly about getting a mixture of beads that look good together! We’ve used:
  • 4mm Blue Sponge Quartz
  • 6mm Morganite
  • 6mm Rose Quartz
  • 6x8mm Milky Pink Crystal Beads
• Gemstone Nugget Bead, approx. 20mm. We’ve used a Blue Sponge Quartz nugget. Anything that is largish will work!
• Short (22-26mm) ball heapins
• 2x 50mm Headpin
• 2x earwire

Tools You’ll Need:

• Round Nose Pliers
• Flush Cutters
• Flat Nose Pliers

Method:

Step 1. First make your dangles. In this design, we have made a traditional wrapped loop. You may have seen in other designs that we often do a cheats loop (like in this design, click here). However, for this design we need the dangles to sit out a little bit, so the cheats loops don’t work very well (trust me, I tried it and it looked odd!). See below images for how to make a wrapped loop (we’ve shown it with a bronze headpin and a lava bead, and this shows up better on the camera!)

Using your round nose pliers, make a small loop:

Wrap 2-3 times:

Trim the tail with your flush cutters.

Make about 15 dangles for each earring.

Step 2: Take your headpin, and slide on the nugget bead.

Step 3. Then, slide on your dangles. I normally slightly graduate these – so I use the bigger ones more towards the bottom, and the smaller 4mm beads near the top.

Step 4. After you have put all the dangles on, I like to use a single bead on the headpin. This is useful to push all the dangles down and keep them more ‘clustered’. It also make forming the loop at the top easier and more snug.

Step 5. Cut your headpin 1cm above the bead. Form a simple loop using round nose pliers.

Step 6. Attach to your earwire. And you’re done!