The other day I finally completed the pile of waiting earrings on the workbench. For some reason they were completely blocking me! I normally work in batches of 100 at a time but these 2 dozen just wouldn’t finish themselves.
But I got ’em all done and reached out for the earwires – to discover only a couple of stray ones at the bottom of a drawer.
Disaster!
I immediately ordered some online, but that takes weeks. I thought about leaving them until the hooks got here and simply working on a different part of the bench, but just couldn’t bear to leave these half-finished earrings on the bench for one more day, staring at me. So, I dug through drawers and boxes and baggies and managed to scrounge up just enough fishhook earwires to match up with what I needed. A sigh of relief – until I realized these were way too long for the tiny little earrings I’d made and they threw off the balance of the design.
Now what? Desperate to just make this pile go away, I grabbed my fattest bailmaking pliers and did a test to see if by making the hook fatter, they’d end up shorter… and it worked! Better yet, I like them way better than the basic fishhook earwires! I think they’re much more elegant and make them stand out.
It’s more work, but I’m so going to do this to all of my earwires from now on. It just goes to show that a pain in the arse can be turned into something kind of special.