Learn the basics to making your own natural hair accessories

Why?

Because I think it’s a fun hobby.

I starting making jewelry before I had natural hair, and before I even got my ears pierced (so when I was about ten-years-old) and it’s something that I do more now to really accessorize my hair.

Some of the earrings I've made these last few months

I have several thousand plastic beads and maybe a couple hundred glass beads. The glass beads are usually prettier, but they have two major low points. The first one being that they are heavier than the plastic and I don't like my ears being weighted down, so that's something to keep in mind. The other issue is that if they shatter, a small shower of glass will run down your shoulders and onto the floor.

How I store my beads

The beauty of the hobby is that you can get beads ANYWHERE. I've gotten mine at WalMart, Kmart, Michaels, and Hobby Lobby. WalMart has the best plastic ones and Michaels has the best glass ones, to me anyway.

The Break Down On What's Used:

Pictured top left: Called Ball Pins or Head Pins, these are used to hold all the beads onto the fish hook, which obviously goes through your piercing. The ones pictured are gold, but you can find them in silver and cobber too.

Pictured top right: Called Fish Hooks, and these go through your earring hole. I have three different colors - cobber, gold, and silver - but they now make them in white and black too in selected Micheals. You can get them in different shapes, with jewels on them, ones with pearls, ones with twisted metal, all types of stuff. It's pretty cool.

Pictured bottom left: Try as I might, I can not remember what these things are called but they're used to hang more than one sting of beads from a single fish hook. If you look at the picture at the top of the page, you can see that I used these on for the first, third, and fourth earrings from the left.

Pictured bottom right: Lastly, these are some glass beads I bought at WalMart. I only paid like five or six dollars for a pound of beads like this but I only got to use a select few because most of the beads did not have matches. So I'll use them for some bracelets when I get some free time.

And finally, a pair of earrings I made last night. I used glass beads from Michaels, copper fish hooks and copper head pins. I finished with both in less than twenty minutes and have a cool pair of earrings to show for it!

I LOVE long, dangly earrings. However, there is one reason why I don’t wear them every day and he's pictured above… Don’t let my nephew’s innocent face fool you. He loves my earrings and will try to pull on them every chance he gets. So, with a heavy heart, I often stick with stud earrings and save the long ones for special occasions.

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