My first earring! My goal was to take a random object we had lying around and
show how it could be made into an earring. These quickly became very popular and
the second one disappeared.
Ball chain, key ring, and red wire earrings. These were inspired by a pair that
a fellow designer/coworker made. I noticed now beautiful the ball chain looked
just dangling and wanted to expand on that idea. The ball chain here is draped
around the keyring and held in place by the red wire. The key to this earring is
that you have to make sure the red wire is wrapped around the key ring and ball
chain tightly!
Paper earrings! We had a stack of brightly colored paper lying around. I cut the
paper into strips, and then into smaller rectangles (all the same size) and
strung them on to the aluminum wire similar to the way I did the duct tape
earrings (below).
What to do with all the spare bits and pieces of foam? The quality I love about
foam the most is its tension. Here, I poked little holes through the foam,
pushed just one ball from the ball chain through, and it held instantly! No glue
required. I will say that this required a bit of patience to get the ball
through the hole.
Duct Tape earrings! You really can do anything with duct tape! We had many
beautiful colors of duct tape to play with, and we ran it as a special for a few
days. These earrings were made by taping two sides of duct tape together (sticky
sides) and poking aluminum wire through the duct tape. As a side note, a guest
stole one of my earrings that I gave her to look at. These two images are
actually different sides of the same earring.
My final pair of earrings. This was not a material we had on display, but we had
a bunch of old record covers left over from our day of using old records. I cut
different triangular shapes from the cover (these feature close ups of the
artist's face) and then traced the same piece on to the back cover and glued the
two pieces together. Finally, the shapes were linked with jump rings. We ran out
of studs, so I had to use the only pair of clip on earrings I could find.
All of these earrings were made while working at summer fest as a part of
my job as a Design Presenter with the Kohl's Mobile Design Lab with Discovery
World. We teach design from everyday random objects and materials. Our focus for
summer fest was wearables (anything you can wear, including accessories). As
always, we use the cheapest, most random materials available.
