Making Miguel Ases Style beaded earrings: Part I

After admiring drooling over Miguel Ases earring styles yesterday, I decided to get busy learning to make something similar.  My plan is to deconstruct some of the earring styles to their basic forms to understand how they are made and how to create my own.

I think the simplest design is the one on the left.  I love mandalas, so I naturally like this style.  I think earrings like this are perfect to wear 'everyday' - to work or with jeans.


I found a really good free tutorial for this beading technique on the
Fusion Beads website.  The beading stitch is brick stitch done around a component and it is really pretty simple.

So, here is my attempt.

I only did 3 rows, but it is taking shape nicely.  I like it enough that I will dig up a couple of more sterling silver spacers and try to make an 'official' pair of earrings in this style over the weekend.

I could have been a little more daring with my color choices though!  Just metallic smoke and black - both in round beads.  I think the other option is to use 'cut' beads - which I may incorporate into a future design.

One of my concerns last night when I was making these was the size.  As you can see, 3 times around is barely 1/2 inch, which is pretty small for a pair of dangle earrings.  But, when I checked the size of the Miguel Ases earrings, they are only a little larger at about 2/3 of an inch, and they have one more round of beading.  I guess that means I did everything right.

The bead I used for the center is a simple smooth  silver spacer bead.  I've gone through my stash and found several different styles that might work, but I decided to keep it simple and as similar to the original earrings to start with. The link above will take you to a bead that is similar to the one I used on Fire Mountain Gems website.  Note that I didn't measure the bead to see if it's the same size - mainly because I think anything similar is going to work fine.