I had so much fun playing with the laser cutter to make these cute daisy earrings! Starting out with a small laser cutter project like this was great as you can cut things from smalls scraps you can find for free!
I liked the idea of incorporating fabric into my earrings so I could make tactile fuzzy centers for my daisies.
The earrings were made up of several different parts glued together.
I cut flower shapes and backing pieces from 3mm white acrylic. The fuzzy fabric centers I cut from a scrap of upholstery fabric. The acrylic centers of the flowers I cut from scraps I found lying around, these were cut from thicker 6mm acrylic.
I designed these in Adobe Illustrator then imported them into Inkscape. Cutting them out on the laser cutter went relatively smoothly, but I had a really hard time gluing them together. The acrylic pieces would slide all over the place and the glue would leave messy marks.
I ended up developing a process where I first glued the fabric circles to the centers and let them dry.
Then, I pushed them into the daisy shapes. This was very fiddly and difficult. I ended up designing and making a small jig to help me do this.
After this, I glued the white backs on. I put an old book and heavy weight on top it all, to clamp the pieces down while they dried.
I also had some trouble getting the right hole size in the flower, to fit the jack rings through. I found I got the neatest finish if I cut a really small hole with laser cutter first, then I opened up the hole using a drill and a 1.6mm drill bit.
The result is these cute things!
This was a fun project and I’m looking for to exploring other kinds of jewelry I can make on the laser cutter!
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