Rework of Earrings

      I enjoyed a day out with my parent yesterday at Old Mystick Village for their sidewalk sale. We got to see the new ducklings that hatched. Sadly we found out that out of eleven ducklings that hatched there are only six left. Apparently the sea gulls will swoop in and take one of the babies. The remaining six were adorable as heck. I wish I would have had my camera with me so I could post a picture of them. They were still soft and fluffy looking.
      Anyway...I digress...As we were looking around at the items shops had on sale we came a cross some really neat jewelry. My mother really like the earrings but was not happy with the ear wires. She has a problem with hooks falling out even with the little rubber backs. Surprised, I guess it's not an uncommon problem. Unsure about them we walked on down the way. After stopping in and grabbing some drinks from another shop we headed on back up the walk way and back on by those earrings. Mom stopped and looked again. Took took some convincing but she got them after I told her that I could change them up to how ever she would like them.
      I wanted to share with you how I went about transforming the earrings.

Here the earrings are before I did anything to them:


One little snip where the solder was holding the dangle on and I removed the original hooks. (Left is the original hooks, right the dangle separated from the hooks.) You'll notice that one of the cool things about these earrings is that the glass balls come out and are interchangeable. I have removed the balls while I work on them to keep from damaging them or loosing them.


I had to find something that would work for mom. She wanted to keep them as a dangle earring. I showed her some posts that I could put them on or some ear wires with a back that comes up and closes the wire, lever earrings. She decided on the lever earrings. Here are the 14K gold wires with the dangle from the original earrings:

Next I had to get out my gold findings. I thought I'd show you what I store my main gold findings in. I found these nice little stack-able snap containers in the dollar bin at Target and they work perfectly.

I thought about dressing them up for her a little so she could wear the out or just with some everyday clothes. I decided on an AB Swarovski crystal and a gold eye pin that I would just make another loop to connect it with. I decided on the AB crystals because they will pick up and reflect whatever color glass balls she has in the earrings.

I attached the original dangle to one of the eyes of the crystal. I then connected the other eye of the crystal to the new lever ear wires with a gold jump ring so that they would hang so you wouldn't see the connector that goes from the top of the glass ball to the bottom. Here they are all done: