Category Archives: amber

Broken amber earring is now… a bracelet

I debated whether or not to turn the broken amber and silver earring into a pendant, but couldn’t find a suitable jump ring (it needed a flattened, oval one rather than a round one IMO). So I hit on the idea of turning it into a bracelet. I had to break off the silver “pad” that would have been opposite the bit of the clip that clamps down on your earlobe. (This needed some care as silver is a soft metal and it was hard to make the pad shear off without distorting the rest of the earring. I just about managed it though.)

Then I filed down the two stumps where the pad had been and where the clip had broken off. I found a fine gauge silver charm bracelet, cut it in half, removed a few of the links on each of the two halves, and inserted the earring in the middle using a couple of small 0.8 mm gauge silver jump rings. Voilà!

Update: the 0.8 mm jump rings turned out to be too flimsy (nearly lost the bracelet while out shopping), so I substituted a pair of 1.0 mm jump rings instead.

Oops. What to do with broken amber earring?

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here – I’ve been busy and my Etsy shop has been doing better than it’s ever done before, so all my efforts have been concentrated there. Now it’s February, and sales have gone down. They always do go down in February. My theory is that the buying public is still spending money in January, because they have an Etsy gift card, or a cash gift from Aunt Jane to use up. Come February, the gift cards are just a memory and people realise that yes, they really do owe that much on their credit card and any discretionary spending is going to have to wait till payday.

This month I had a rare trip to Canterbury to browse the local charity shops. I like going to Canterbury, but its charity shops – while great to browse around – don’t tend to yield that much in the way of affordable shop items. I was however delighted to find these Celtic beauties, made from sterling silver and amber:

On getting them home, I noticed that the clip was misaligned on one of the earrings, so I tried gently bending it to get it in place. Sadly, it snapped right off, leaving a stump. Oops.

I will have to think about what I want to do with the broken earring, because it’s too nice to scrap.