Repurposing beaded earrings

While we were in Washington D.C. I stopped into a big Forever 21 store, which was conveniently located across the street from the Crumbs cupcake shop we visited FOUR times in THREE days. Most of the time I get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of STUFF in that store and have to just get out of there FAST, but this time I stopped to look at the earrings. I found this 4" long dangly pair made up of pretty purple fire-polished iridescent glass beads. I showed them to the Mister, who probably internally raised his eyebrows at their length, but bless his heart, he didn't say a word. I told him that I wasn't going to wear them--I had other plans for them!

As soon as I got home, I got to work with my needle-nose pliers and some ring blanks I had purchased a while ago. The ring blanks have a series of little loops on the top to which you attach beads on headpins.

Which is precisely what these earrings were made of! It was incredibly easy to remove the beads from the large jump rings on the earrings and thread them through the loops on the ring blank. Somebody had already done all the hard work of threading the beads on the headpins, cutting and looping them.

After just a few minute I was left with two stripped earrings (with jump rings and french wires that I'll repurpose another time) and four cute, sparkly beaded rings, all for $6 and about 20 minutes of my time. I'm feeling rather clever!