With Valentine’s Day around the corner, it’s hard enough to try and foot the bill for food, wine, and sappy gifts, let alone the cost of something sparkly blinging from your ears (or the ears of your sweetheart). Here’s a quick how-to for throwing together festive jewelry that people won’t even believe is real candy:
Supplies:
- Krazy Glue (one with a brush applicator works best)
- Two three-inch eyepins
- Two hanging earrings (can be from a pair of old earrings, too)
- Pliers
- Scissors
- Large conversation hearts
Step 1: Pick out hearts
Try to pick ones with bold text, as they pop more. Eat the ones with a faded font. Seriously, conversation hearts taste wonderful. Mmm.
Step 2: Cut the wire
Line each conversation heart up against an eyepin, setting the candy just below the loop on the top. Pinch the wire just below where the bottom of the heart is, and cut off the wire’s top portion. Once it’s cut, make sure the part with the loop is completely straight. After cutting, you should be left with this:
Step 3: Glue, glue, glue
Brush a coat of Krazy Glue down the center of the back of each heart and lay the wire down gently, so that the loop on its top is parallel to the surface you’re working on. Coat the wire in glue, and let it dry for a few minutes. Repeat the gluing process twice for each earring. Be careful, though — I found out the hard way that it’s terribly easy to permanently glue your fingers together. So, keep a pen or scissors handy as a tool to press down the wire so that you don’t have candyhands for the next few days.
Step 4: Finishing touches
After letting the conversation hearts dry for 10–15 minutes, use a pliers to pry open the bottom loop of the earring piece, and put the wired candy onto it.
Close the loop with the pliers, and voila!
To make three-heart earrings:
Step 1: Arrange the hearts
Pick which three colors of hearts you will use, and what order you’d like them to be in.
Step 2: Gluing the first heart
Instead of cutting the wire, glue the bottom heart (in this case, yellow) to the wire in the same process as the singular earrings. To make sure the wire stays straight, balance the loop-end on a spare candy heart (here, pink).
Step 3: Repeat, repeat!
Glue the second heart (purple) onto the wire above the previous one (yellow), balancing both on top of spare hearts to ensure that any glue dripping between the two doesn’t cause it to stick to paper.
Do the same for the top heart (pink). Follow the instructions for Step 4 (from above), and you should end up with something like this:
