Easy Silver Earrings Tutorial That Sell Well!

Hello and welcome to this tutorial video where I will show you how to make a pair of silver earrings that you can sell at your local craft fair. Make sure you stick around to the end because I will tell you how much you can actually sell these for and I'll also be announcing the winner of the giveaway I did recently to a lucky person who's going to win a spot in my Consistent Sales Academy course. So when you are designing earrings I like to first play around with a few ideas on paper and just get a feel for a couple of different designs. For this tutorial I'm thinking of making a pair of nature inspired earrings with a minimalist geometric take on them. So here I'm just drawing a couple of different versions until I'm happy with a design and then I will go from there and pick one. So here I'm going to pick this pair on the bottom here that I think I'm pretty happy with. So there's a couple of different ways you can go about the next step. So what I'm going to do is cut the actual design out because I'm really happy with the way that that looks but another option is to draw your design directly onto the plastic film that covers the silver sheet. But another option that you can do is to use double-sided tape and stick your design onto the sheet so that it doesn't move around. Here I'm choosing the sheet metal that I'm going to use. As it's a fairly delicate design I'm going to go with a slightly thicker weight sheet so I'm going to go with a 0.6 silver sheet. This will be fairly robust and have a nice weight to it. So there's a few different options as well for the next step. So I am here tracing the amount of silver that I'm going to use and then I'm going to texture that. So I'm just going to roughly draw out how much I'm going to need making sure not to waste any metal. You can either hammer afterwards if you want to but I'm going to hammer before that's why I'm going to just roughly cut out the piece that I'm going to need first and then I will texture that afterwards. So once you've cut out the piece like I'm just finishing off here then you want to make sure that you remove the plastic film. You don't want to keep this on while you're hammering because it's going to leave a gooey gross stickiness to your silver and you don't want that. I have a nice metal block that I used to texture and a rubber block underneath that absorbs some of the noise that it makes when hammering. I decided to go for a really fine hammer texture rather than using my usual bigger ball-peen hammer. I'm going for a really delicate little hammered finish as the design itself is quite fine. I thought it would look best this way. Next what you want to do is flip over the sheet and draw on the back of the metal. The reason you want to draw on the back is because this saves you having to worry about any scratch marks that might be left after you finish your design. As you progress you will obviously have less of these but in the beginning you might not cut it completely perfect and that's completely and utterly fine but then at least your scratches are on the back and not on the front of your design so they won't interfere with that. Next you want to grab a saw and cut that out. Ideally you should be cutting out just on the outside of your line and then file down to the line but in this case because my pair of earrings is fairly organic shape and the space between the different parts of the design isn't very big I decided just to cut directly on the line. Once you're done cutting you can then use a needle file and file any of the little excess bits off and just refine the shape of your design and make it all beautiful and nice. So you want to go at a little bit of an angle to take the sharpness off the edges so if you brush your finger along you don't want to feel any sharpness because when you're cutting the saw pushes the metal outwards so it's always going to be a little bit rough to touch around the edges. Next we're going to choose the ear wire. So ideally what you want to be using for standard ear pins is a wire that is 0.8 millimeters thick. This is the standard size for ear wire so I would recommend using this unless it's for stretched ears. Then what I'm doing is creating a very flat surface at the top of the earrings where I'm going to solder the earring pin on and I want to do that to the wire as well so that they are going to have a nice tight join and the solder is going to flow. Next I'm going to mix up some flux with my borax cone by adding a little bit of water to the little container and give it a nice rubbing till it grinds some of that borax cone and turns that into a paste. So you want to have a nice paste consistency which you then apply to both the earring and the hook itself. Then what you want to do is use a third arm. I find these very helpful just to hold the piece in place and then you have one free hand to do everything else that you need. So position that so that it's facing directly in front of you so that the heat is going evenly across the whole surface so you don't want it to be at an angle. In terms of solder you want to find the smallest piece you can get away with because solder isn't the exact same color as silver so over time that will tarnish a little bit. Then using my handheld torch I'm going to adjust the flame so it's relatively pointy. We don't want to have too much of a bushy flame because we want to have a nice strong direct heat on the point where we're going to solder. Now what I like to do is what's called sweat soldering. So you just pick up the piece of solder on the end of the wire and then you can using your hand and the other third arm position that in place and hold it exactly where you want to solder it. I find this saves me so much time rather than setting up fiddly little solder setups. Things do move a little bit as you see but you can still you have enough time to wiggle that and get that into place before the solder flows. So you want to be focusing the heat on the bottom more than the top. Once that's done remove that from the third arm and quench that off in some nice cold water just to cool that off. Grab it with your copper tongs and then pop it into the pickle pot and leave that there for a couple of minutes and in the meantime you can get going on the second item. So hold that in place. What I did was actually use my pliers to get a really nice tight grip with the third arm because it was actually getting a little bit looser and same thing all over again using the heat of the torch to pick up that solder and then position it in place. In terms of soldering you want to look for the metal changing colors. So just as it's about to start turning orange that's when you know the solder is about to flow. So you want to really point the tip of that blue flame directly at the solder joint just then when it goes to then make that solder flow. And then as soon as it goes you want to switch off that flame instantly. So watch until it goes all shiny and flows and then stop. And once again drop that in the water and then pop it in the pickle pot and leave that for a couple of minutes. Depending on how fresh your pickle is you can come back to that in a few minutes or you might need to wait a little bit longer if it's not too fresh. So there we have it. Give those a little rinse off in the water just to make sure that all of that pickles off there and they are looking super nice and lovely. Give them a really good dry because you don't want any of that water to touch any of your metal tools because you will start to see rust if any water is left on those. So to avoid that always just make sure you give it a good dry before you go heading towards your bench. So those are looking great and ready for the next step which is cleaning them up to make sure they look really lovely. So starting off using my needle file I'm just going to round off the end of the wire because we don't want that to be uncomfortable or scratchy when it goes into your ear and then use a bit of 600 grit wrapped around a stick just to give it a nice finish and make sure that it's smooth to the touch. Then what you can do is use the stick to also clean up all of the edges. So going at a bit of an angle just to make sure that it's all nice and smooth. You obviously don't want to brush that across the top of your surface because that's going to interfere with your lovely hammered texture and then you can use a piece of handheld sheet of 600 grit sandpaper just to get in those little hard to reach areas and make sure that you remove all of those file marks and finish it off with a bit of 4000 grit steel wool which really brings out the shine in that hammered texture. For the ear wire you want to find a dowel or a pen or something nice and round to bend and shape that ear hook with and you can choose whatever shape you want or whatever size you want and then using a pair of pointy nose pliers I like to just grab the end of the ear wire holding it right close to the tip and give a little flick up so that's so much easier to put into the ear and that is looking super beautiful. What I'm just gonna do to finish it up is to give it a little bit more of an organic shape by moving some of the different parts of the leaf into different shapes using a piece of polishing cloth to protect my earrings from the pliers because you don't want to have any marks on the pliers and that is pretty much it for making those earrings so I would recommend selling these for around $40 because it took me about half an hour to make and that is I wouldn't recommend selling them for any less than that and for the part we've all been waiting for the announcement of the winner of the giveaway for the consistent sales academy goes to Mila Silva. Congratulations Mila I look forward to welcoming you into the course so that's it for this video please consider liking and subscribing and I will see you next week in another video take care bye