January 2013

One of the nicest current fashion trends is the Baroque influence. In clothing this can mainly been in the use of heavy brocade fabrics, often with large embroidered panels with bouquets of roses. And think lots of gold, black and false pearls. Fashion house Dolce and Gabbana in particular have reintroduced this style of extravagance, and it is this feeling that inspired these earrings. They are large and quite heavy – in short, a piece of jewelry to make a statement with and impress!

What do you need?

A pair of ready-to-use earrings with large ornaments is used as a base.
Besides these, each earring combines one large porcelain flower cabochon with several small porcelain rose beads.

Just fiddle around a bit with the flowers until you have found a look that you like. Maybe you would rather use flowers all in one colour? At least try putting the loose flowers on the ornament first, before starting to glue them down. That way you will know for sure that everything will fit properly. Of course the bead flowers have holes in them, by the way, but the backs have a flat surface that is ideal for gluing onto things.

Glue. For these earrings I used Hasulith jewelry glue.
If you want, you can use a toothpick or headpin to spread the glue on the materials.
The earrings don't come with earnuts (backs), but these are available for sale separately.

Other tips for assembling your earrings

It is better to start out with too little glue rather than too much. Let it dry for half an hour and then test whether all the flowers are properly attached. Then you can add some extra glue where needed.
I put the earrings flat on a white peace of paper to dry. I think the flowers are too heavy to let them dry at an angle. Some of the glue leaked through the earrings onto the paper, causing some bits of paper to get stuck to the back of the earrings. But using a little bit of sandpaper on the back of the ornament was enough to remove these.