Living with Less: DIY Pop-Top Earrings

Hiya!

So, I made these earrings before I left the U.S., but I thought they went with the theme of making do and are very much in the South African vein of making beautiful things out of stuff that most of us would throw away.

They are among my very favorite earrings (and I have a HUGE collection, lemme tell ya) and I always get lots of compliments when I wear them.  People ask, “What are those made of?” and they’re always surprised to find out that they’re just made out of pop tops.  (That would be soda tabs if you’re not a Midwesterner!)

They are much lighter than you’d think for such fabulous, bold earrings:

 

Each individual pop top can shift around, which contributes to their strong, sculptural quality:

 

They really make quite a statement – for next to no money!

 

They’ve got great “swish”

 And I love the fact that they look totally different, depending on the angle or light:

 

I don’t have any pictures of when I made them.  But never fear – these are incredibly easy to make.  Just stack them to the height you want (mine are 29 tabs high), bind them together, and attach an earring hook.

In fact there are really only 2 things to keep in mind:

1. Keep all the tabs either face up or face down (rough side down is how I did mine), and
2. Flip the direction of the tabs as you stack them, otherwise they go lopsided.  In other words, the first tab will have the smaller hole towards the left, then the 2^nd tab will have the smaller hole towards the right, the 3^rd will be towards the left, and so on and so on …

Here’s how I bound mine together:

Do you see the thin jewelry wire?  It’s just looped through one side of the tabs and out through the other.

And even though I used jewelry wire to bind mine together, I think they’d be super cute if they were bound by a colorful ribbon, yarn, etc.

 

Experiment with what you have around the house – and enjoy them!

PS:  If you don’t drink a lot of soda, or don’t want to wait to collect all those pop tops, go on eBay.  You can find huge bags of them for $5 or so …