Huggie Earrings – Setting Beads & Beach Glass

Amoracast has come up with a fantastic and easy way to turn sea glass, drilled semi-precious stones and practically anything you want into a pair of beautiful and unique earrings!
I’ve used a pair of their prong settings with a loop which you can put through your ear piercing and wrap around your earlobe.  Amoracast also has a stud setting which is equally as easy to use both styles are available in gold vermeil; which features their special anti-tarnish coating, and 925 sterling silver.

I started off by curling ( bending ) the individual prongs slightly inwards, it’s a lot easier to do this now before you place in your bead rather than after. You don’t need to use a lot of force because sterling silver is malleable – so just use a minimum of effort. Remember, because they’re 925silver if you bend them back and forth too much this ‘works’ the silver which has the effect of hardening it and making it brittle. After curling the prongs slightly I slip in the bead and make sure it’s approximately the shape I want.  I hold down the bead and, because I’ve already curled them slightly, push each prong down a little more in turn. This secures them against the bead. It’s a lot easier to do a bit at a time and you can certainly do this with pliers but since these are already curled it’s easy enough to push them down with my fingers.  And there you have it, however, if your piece is irregular you’ll have to take your time and do this part slowly and adjusting the prongs to the right angle but it’s still really easy to do.

For the stud earrings, I’ve used a druzy which is irregular in height.  Sometimes irregularly shaped stones can be hard to glue but this is a strong setting which can hold almost anything you decide to set.  We’ve used the same technique with briolette Chalcedony beads and these Herkimer diamonds.

We’ve also successfully set a river stone, this means you can go hunting on the beach and whatever you find you can turn into earrings without doing a lot of heavy setting. This opens up unlimited possibilities for using druzys that have been too difficult to string or beads that have holes too small to do anything with, now you can turn them into a gorgeous pair of earrings.

This is a very narrow marquise shape, you can leave the prongs longer or you can trim them beforehand – same with irregular-shaped drilled pearls – as long as the holes aren’t showing when you look at it you’re good.

Sea glass is one of my favourite things and now you can make them into pairs of earrings very easily with these Huggie earrings.  What I find the easiest to set is anything round such as a 5 mm, 6 mm or 7 mm round bead.

There you have it – it’s very very simple to use these clever little contraptions.

Watch the video and see how easy these are to use!