When I first began selling my jewellery at local markets I found many customers belived dangle earrings were to heavy to wear, or they hang down to far and are either not comfortable or catch on clothing. I also met a lot of younger ladies who would really like to have some dangly earrings to wear when not at school but again the size of standard findings meant they weren't proportiantly correct to the smaller ear size.

At first I made single bead dangles hung from posts rather than french wires and while they were popular they were not the same as 'real dangles' I decided to tackle this problem in another way and move from the comercial findings to my own and control the sizing of them to accomidate the need for a smaller version of the french earwire.

After learning to make my own findings and how to file them properly to make sure they wouldn't scratch when wearing. I began forming the shapes of a standard sized earwire and working out how they would have to be made to be smaller. Since I would not only have to shrink the size of the curve but also make sure they would still stay secure in the ear like the full sized wires.

I found my ideal curve on a 6mm mandrel and formed the loop of the wires for attaching the beads in the same way as I did for my larger earwires substituting the 4mm bead for a seed bead to compliment the choice of bead for the design.

Selceting the beads to work with involved a small amount of trial and error. because of the size of the wires they were not really suitable for multiple bead clusters, if the beads were larger than 4mm. I also couldn't use a bead larger than 10mm since the balance of the earring was wrong in larger sizes.

Once I had made the first range I decided to name them. I settled on DinkErings (dinky earrings) I found the name catchy and they have proved to be popular because of the thought behind the product and my experiance in the constuction of earrings.

DinkErings by Scarlet Leonard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.