Easy DIY! Make your own cocktail rings

I had a few sharp eye readers notice my vintage earring to ring DIY that I occasionally wear on my lookbooks and ask for a tutorial.  It's really quite easy and not much skill is needed except the ability to use pliers and glue! :)  When I go vintage shopping, I often find pretty brooches or earrings and I think "that would look fabulous as a ring!" which is basically how I came up with the DIY.  I stumble upon a lot of vintage clip on earrings that I love but wouldn't wear as earrings so this is a terrific way to make good use out of them.

1. Find the pieces that you'd like to turn into rings

2. The tools: Glue | Pliers | Felt | Ring Base

3. & 4. The earring you want to make into a ring + the ring base

5. Take the clip of the earring off by gently removing the entire piece with pliers

6. Cut out a piece of felt that just covers the base of the earring

7. Glue the felt to the earring with glue (I used Beacon Gem-Tac Glue)

8. Glue the ring base to the felt (I used Aleene's Jewelry & Metal Glue)

Hold the ring base down tightly to the jewelry for a few minutes

9. Voila!  A new ring for you to wear!

A few notes: 

• I used 2 different glues because the Gem Tac glue is a lot less stronger and glueing the felt to the earring doesn't require a super strong glue, whereas the ring base is really light and can fly off really easily so I used a much stronger adhesive to glue the ring base on.
• I searched high and low at all the craft stores around here for ring bases and came up with nothing so you may have better luck at the stores near you.  If not, I went on ebay to get mine.  I don't remember the seller I bought them from, but these are the same bases.  ($8 for 100 bases so not expensive at all.)  I like that they are adjustable so I can wear them on any finger.
• The pliers I used are a jewelry pliers that also cut wire and other metals.  Really effective when you have earring bases with posts or a pendant where you want to clip off the loop where the necklace goes.  For the clip on earrings you can use regular pliers too.
• If the earring back (or whatever you are using) is smooth, you can probably skip the felt part.  That's just so you have a smooth surface to glue the ring base on.  

You can make rings with anything that you find that can be stuck on the ring base.  Here are a few that I made: The flower was previously a pendant that I found at the craft store for like $2.  And a bow that I also found at the craft store for really cheap and came with a pack of 6 bows.  Both make for cute rings for very little cost!

 

These two are my favorites that I've turned into rings.  The blue rhinestones are my mom's earrings that she wore back in the 80's.  I rummaged through her costume jewelry box and found lots of fun jewelry to either just wear as is or make into something new.  The gold one on the right is a vintage find from an antique mall that was previously a clip on earring.  The nice part about having earrings is that you always have one to give away to somebody!  My mom loves having her old earring that was just sitting in her jewelry box as a fun ring to wear now.

Have fun with it and even just look through your own jewelry box for things that you stopped wearing long ago and see if you can upcycle them into a pretty cocktail ring for your finger!  Just a caveat that this is not the most effective way to make into rings as the glue can become loose and it can fall off so I do recommend using very strong glue when making these and also jewelry pieces that aren't too pricey/meaningful in case something does happen to them.  I've had to re-glue a few that have come loose after a long day of wearing them and accidentally smacking them into things but really, a dab of glue is not so hard to do so it's worth it to me!

P.S. A few new posts from me over at the Smarter blog!  Check out my favorite accessory to add a pop of color to your outfit and my tips on how to style pleated skirts!

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