Beaded Earrings Tutorial - How to Use Circular Brick Stitch Creatively

by Shuang Liu November 18, 2019

View the Product Used in this Project

As a jewelry crafter, I guess most of you are familiar with the circular brick stitch (If not, read my post here). Basically, it is a simple stitch to attach beads around a circle. However, despite it’s name “circular”, do you know you can create all sorts of shapes using this beading technique? Today, I’ll show you how to make beaded teardrops and beaded fans using circular brick stitch and turn them into a pair of beautiful earrings.

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How to make a teardrop shape using circular brick stitch

beaded teardrop shape

In a regular brick stitch, we add one bead at a time around the circle ( in our case, around the center bead). But if you want to create a tipping point so the round shape can become a teardrop, you need to add two beads as shown in picture 6. Attach the later one using regular brick stitch. The former one will stick out to shape the teardrop.

how to make a beaded teardrop shape

How to make a fan shape using circular brick stitch

No. 1. Small Beaded Fan

The small beaded fan is very similar to the teardrop shape shown above. As you can see in picture 18, we first make a teardrop; then add another layer of gold seed beads around the lower half of the teardrop. To make it resemble a fan, keep the two gold beads at each side loose (you will understand what I mean by looking at picture 20 below). We can adjust those two beads so they sit perpendicular to others (picture 21).

how to make small beaded fan using circular brick stitch

No.2. Large Beaded Fan

To make the fan shape larger, we need to add one more bead in the center to increase its height. The green bead you see in picture 26 serves that purpose. The other steps are similar to the teardrop and small fan we introduced earlier.

But in case you are still confusing, here is a brief explanation on how to building up the layers.

First Layer (picture 26): 5 blue beads +1 green bead
Second Layer (picture 32): 5 gold beads +7 red beads
Third Layer (picture 36) : 9 gold beads

how to make large beaded fan using circular brick stitch

How to assemble the earrings

Once the beading part is completed, we can move on to assemble the earrings. Each earring will need: 2 beaded teardrop, 2 beaded small fan, 1 beaded large fan and 1 wired circle. If you don't know how to make a wired circle, read it here.

Connect the beaded shapes as shown in picture 38. Then attach them to a wired circle using 28/30 gauge wire. You can also add a few seed beads at both sides to complete the design.

Since the earring is already quite long, I want to skip the large earring hook and use an earring post instead. To achieve that, we can first attach a metal connector at the back of a beaded fan using the beading thread (picture 41). Then glue the earring post to the smooth surface of the connector (picture 42).

As the last step, attach the beaded fan with earring post to the wired hoop. This colorful beaded earring is completed!

how to assemble beaded earrings