Bamboo bling

What do you do when you simply have no earrings to wear and no supplies to make new ones?* Head out into the garden and do some pruning in the bamboo grove, of course.

To be honest, I didn’t just go out and grab this black bamboo, I cut it from our backyard and chopped it up into short lengths a few years ago (!!) so it’s had plenty of time to dry out. I rediscovered these bits sitting around in the garage recently and sanded the ends down ready for use.

They would have looked a bit boring in plain black so I painted them yellow at each end – if you want to do something similar with plain tubular beads I recommend using skewers like these as it makes it easier to paint them.

I just used normal acrylic paint so it didn’t take long to dry (I rested the skewers between thick books placed over newspaper).

And then the even more fun bit… assembling the earrings using odds and ends from my stash (clip-on earrings, long eye pins, tassels and jump rings). It’s easy to add dangly bits to clip-ons if you put a jump ring over the base of the clip.

Easy!

And there you have it – pruning pays off sometimes!

*You all know I’m joking on both counts, seeing as I have something like 100 pairs of earrings and enough stash for about a century of DIY projects… agghhh….