We're All Ears: December 2018: Use Your Leftovers

I have to admit that Erin's Use Your Leftovers challenge is often one of the toughest of the years for me... that's because I don't really tend to have the kind of "craftermath" that she's challenging us to make use of.  My space is so limited that I really don't tend to leave beads out on my bead mat once I've finished a project unless I know I'm about to use them for something else that got sparked when I was creating the primary creation.  In the past, I've cheated a little bit and tackled some earring UFOs (unfinished objects) of making something from new beads that I haven't gotten around to putting away (I won't show you the piles of bags that fall into that category right now!)

Anyway, for this, the 4th annual Use Your Leftovers challenge over on the Earrings Everyday blog, I finally have true craftermath and actual leftovers to make new earrings with!!  Woo hoo!

Since Thanksgiving I've been on an etched Christmas ornament making kick.  I mean, I've been a machine with the salt water etching and still may try another small batch.  Here is a peek at just a few of the ornaments I've made so far.

Some of these have already sold, but there's still time for a special order!

So, as you can imagine, when I cut my ornament shapes out of the small pieces of copper sheet that I've etched, there's a decent amount of copper left over.  Here's the pile from my most recent batch!  If you really look you can see that there are some places that there's just extra design left over from what I cut, and some places where I had tons of extra blank space so I filled in with extra stamped images.  Now you may wonder what I'm going to do with all of that!  Why, use my handy-dandy disc cutter of course!!

After cutting as many circles in various sizes as humanly possible (trying for matched pairs first), it was time to file any rough edges.  Fortunately, my little Pepe cutter is a wonder and the circles mostly just needed some light sanding and a little brush with steel wool to be plenty smooth.

Next came the process of matching various pairs up for two-tiered earrings and deciding which ones would be singletons.  So. Many. Circles.

Some I went matchy-matchy with the patterns... some I added some Gilders Paste to parts... some I added charms or bead dangles... some I went a little more random.  I love them all!!  I'm hoping my customers enjoy this new collection even half as much as I enjoyed making them!

Not earrings... but I also made a couple of necklaces that I'm just too excited about to not share at least one of them!  I ended up with some singletons of different sizes so I put some together.  This one has gone off to live with my good friend Kathleen in Georgia!

Thanks for stopping by to see what I've been up to.  This is blog hop, so I hope you'll pop over to the Earrings Everyday blog HERE to see what everyone else has created from their craftermath.