Hollow beads are a delight to make as they allow you to create larger pieces without the heavy weight of metal - which also, of course, helps to keep your costs down! This is the second of my classes on hollow beads, and time I'm going to show you how to make little boxes that are perfect for earrings, as you can see here, and also as beads for pendants, long necklaces and bracelets too.

As well as tips for soldering safely and getting a beautiful finish on your beads I will teach you how to attach secure earwires so that you can be confident that your finished earrings are going to last. I set myself the challenge of using silver left over from other projects for my beads, and so I'll also show you how to recycle both wire and sheet into different gauges and profiles. However, you don't have to use a rolling mill to decorate these beads - hammers and texture stamps also give beautiful results - and you can obviously buy the silver at suitable sizes rather than recycle.

I've kept the shape of the earrings simple so that we can concentrate on the techniques, but once you've mastered those techniques you'll find it easy to make ovals, teardrops and more!

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The Dotty Box Earrings class is part of a series on Intermediate Silversmithing. As you progress through the series I will help you build on the skills covered in the Silversmithing for Beginners series, encouraging you to create more complex projects. I will always take you through everything you need step by step, and include troubleshooting sections where appropriate too. We will be covering soldering, various methods of stone setting, etching and more. This class will add more advanced soldering techniques to your list of skills as well as teaching you more about texturing with a rolling mill.

The first hollow beads class, Hollow Lentil Beads can be found below:

Janice Root

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