We're All Ears: May 2017

For this month's We're All Ears challenge over on the Earrings Everyday blog, Erin has challenged us to turn trash into treasure!  Basically take something we would normally toss out and turn it into fabulous earrings!

I immediately knew that I wanted to finally get back to playing with some aluminum beer and pop cans that I've been saving.  I even bought some new punches (really meant for paper) to use for the project and Eric and I have been buying some beers exclusively for the cans they are packaged in.  (So much for not judging a book, or a beer, by it's cover!!)

I specifically wanted to try out the two flower shaped punches that I picked up... hoping that they would work together size wise for earrings... spoiler alert... they did!  I wanted a good pop of color for the center flower so I chose a super funky can from Stillwater Artisanal.  I didn't have another colorful can that coordinated with the pink, purple, and yellow so I went for a neutral and used the grey color from one of our local breweries, Insight Brewing.  Here's a before picture!

Aluminum cans are much thinner than you'd expect... that meant that for jewelry use I wanted to have some sort of more substantial backing for them.  Luckily, my flower shapes were the perfect size to fit on top of a circle blank from Vintaj.  I used an embossing folder with my Big Kick on an Arte Metal blank and then sanded the front side to bring out some of the silver color on what was going to be my base layer.  The upside of the ultra thin aluminum is that I was able to stack my components and punch a hole in the center of all three at one time!  I then riveted the pieces together and used my dapping block to dome the whole thing.  Lastly, I wanted the earrings to have a little more dimension, so I gently curved up the petals of both aluminum flowers.  To finish off my design I used some coordinating Czech glass rondelles.

I hope to play more with this idea soon, but life has been crazy busy with not nearly enough time at my bead table.  I feel lucky that I finished one pair of earrings!  As a bonus, I'll also share a pair of earrings that Eric made using circles cut from an Indeed Brewing can.  (They have some super fun designs!)

Thanks for stopping by to see my newest earrings!  Pop over to the Earrings Everyday blog to see what trash transformations other folks came up with!