Where Bloggers Live: 10 Easy DIY Bead Earring Designs + Fall Jewelry Tips

Welcome back to the monthly edition of Where Bloggers Live! I am lucky to have joined a terrific group of bloggers who give a peek into the places and spaces where they spend their time.

Today's topic is...Top 10 Things I Couldn't Live Without. But since my top choices are my husband, family members, my best friend (who is basically family too), beads, birds, and bunnies, that doesn't make for a very long post! So I will riff on the "beads" part of my list to talk about fall jewelry.

In my most recent Style Imitating Art post, I shared a summer outfit to which I had added fall necklaces, bracelets, earrings, and flats to fit the brief of the style challenge as well as introduce some elements that shift my look into the summer/fall transition season. And in my Strange September post, I discussed how this month stands weirdly in between seasons with warm weather but fall feels. So I thought I'd focus today on two topics related to fall jewelry:

1. Tips for selecting fall-vibe jewelry for now through the end of the season...whether you are making it, purchasing it, or shopping your closet.

2. 10 very easy DIY earring designs that require minimal supplies, tools, and skill...easy enough for beginners but effective enough for beaders of all levels.

First, 3 tips for choosing fall jewelry...

Tip 1: Use a Fall Color Palette

This tip has value whether your outfits adhere to a strict color palette that you wear year-round, you change your color palette to align to the seasons, or you wear all the colors all year long. By selecting jewelry (and other accessories) in classic or trending fall colors, you can add some autumnal vibes to your outfits. Depending on your clothing choices, fall color jewelry will match, coordinate, or create a nice contrast in your outfits.

Classic fall colors are those that mimic the warmth, richness, and depth of nature during the season; think earthy colors like brown, rust/burnt orange, maroon, mustard, and dark green are perennial choices for autumn.

The fall/winter 2025 color trends add extra warm-toned options that will feel on point this season and mix well with the classic colors; these include bright chili pepper red, light slime/pickle green, rusty copper, and vivid electric purple.

I personally wear all colors in all seasons, but I do shift my outfits to emphasize the colors in my seasonal palettes. From now through around mid-December (or whenever I am ready to go into Christmas color mode), I focus on these warm and earthy colors in clothing and accessories:

For jewelry, I think warm and dark metallic colors like gold, antique gold, antique brass, antique bronze, antique copper, stainless steel, and gunmetal are good choices, but I personally will happily use rose gold and bright silver for fall jewelry as well. If you gravitate toward either warm or cool toned metals, use whichever one you like best and don't worry too much about the seasonality. If you like to follow jewelry trends, both bright yellow gold and mixed metals are on trend for fall 2025.

Tip 2: Use Fall Motifs

While florals for spring may not be groundbreaking, we do associate different motifs with different seasons of the year, and if you like any classic fall motifs like harvest foods (e.g., apples, gourds/pumpkins, bread/muffins/pies), wild mushrooms, acorns/pine cones, woodland animals (e.g. foxes, owls, deer, squirrels), autumn leaves/trees, cozy candles/fires, warm cups of tea/coffee...well now's a great time to lean into them! For jewelry, motif shaped beads, charms, and pendants are an easy way to create a fall vibe. For those making paper beads or paper covered pendants/earrings, it's easy to turn your favorite motifs from magazines, catalogs, junk mail, paperboard food boxes, scrapbook paper, photos, etc., into wearable autumnal art.

Fall motif collage created with PowerPoint images

And while these motifs are a natural fit with beads in colors of the fall palette, you can use them with any colors! If the traditional warm fall colors aren't your favorite, you can still create/wear jewelry with an autumnal vibe by adding fall motifs to beads in your preferred colors. Many of these motifs are readily available as metal charms/pendants that will pair nicely with any colors.

Tip #3: Favorite Fall Clothing/Accessories, Particularly Prints

In addition to fall colors and fall motifs, you can also consider prints, fabrics, and textures that have fall associations. Popular fall prints include animal prints, plaids, stripes, polka dots, and dark florals; popular fall fabrics include wool, corduroy, tweed, and sweater knits.

I think it only makes sense to consider our jewelry choices in the context of our clothing and outfits. If you have favorite pieces for the fall season, identify them so you can ensure you have jewelry that works those pieces/combinations. You might want jewelry that blends in with these pieces or makes a contrasting statement. Not only do the colors and prints of your fall clothing matter, so does the fabric, texture, and silhouette/cut. A dainty necklace you wear with lightweight, lower cut clothing in warm weather will not serve you as well on a big cowlneck sweater, for example. If you wear scarves frequently in the fall, you might want to shift your jewelry away from short necklaces toward longer necklaces, bracelets, and/or earrings.

Here are some of the print pieces in my wardrobe that I routinely wear in the fall that I would want to keep in my mind as I prepare my fall jewelry (to make, buy, or curate from my closet).

Next, let's take a look at 10 very easy, beginner-friendly beaded earrings designs that can be made with basic supplies and tools. I like bead-on-wire earrings as a project because they are quick to make and don't require a lot of supplies (just a few beads, ear wires, and some combination of wire, head pins, eye pins, and jump rings; they are a terrific way to use your bead soup). It's also a great way to experiment with putting sets of beads into appealing patterns/vignettes, which is also a thing in making beaded bracelets and jewelry. Once you get started, stacking beads on wire can become addictive!

For these designs, you will need a few basic techniques (which I will link to jewelry maker instructions or video for):

-Make a simple loop (20 or 21 gauge wire/pin) or a wire wrapped loop (22 or 24 gauge wire/pin); note if you are using 20 or 21 gauge, you can also use a one-step looper, my favorite way to do it

-Open and close the loop on the top of the bead stack or the ear wire to connect

I am sharing 6 stack designs and 4 dangle designs today, all of which use only beads - no charms, drops, links, hoops, or other components are needed. (Stay tuned for a follow-up post that shows how to create designs that do use additional components.)

-In stack designs, all the beads are stacked onto one head pin. The only articulation point is where the ear wire is attached to the loop at the top of the head pin so the entire beaded portion "swings" together.

-In dangle designs, there is both a head pin with bead(s) at the bottom but also an eye pin with beads(s) above it which connects to the ear wire. This gives the earring an extra articulation point so there is more "jangle" and movement in the earring.

I'm sharing examples of these designs from my own collection with a focus on fall-forward colors and motifs. Let's take a look!

Earring Design #1: Statement Bead

If you have a pair of large statement beads, they can take center stage in your earrings. Feel free to pair them with spacer beads, bead caps, and/or additional small beads, but a statement bead can also look great put on a head pin by itself. Note that the bead soup earrings at upper right use two similar but mismatched beads strung asymmetrically for an organic look. You could even use two totally different beads for a very eclectic pair of statement earrings.

Earring Design #2: 3 Beads (or So) on a Stick

This is the classic stack earring with 3 (or 2 or 4 or 5...) beads added to a head pin. This is a great design for playing with elements like color, shape, material, finish, texture, etc., in your earrings. The effectiveness of the end result is about how you create your stack. Use multiple colors to create a color combo that speaks to you, that coordinates well with your clothing, or gives you all the fall vibes...or keep the beads within one color family to create a monochromatic piece. Be sure to take the weight of your beads into account when designing earrings with more than 3-4 beads: glass and stone beads are relatively heavy while wood and acrylic beads are light. My ears are sensitive to weighty earrings so I often mix wood or acrylic beads into a longer stack, especially if the beads are also large.

Earring Design #3: Bead Stack with Metal Motif Bead(s)

Take your "beads on a stick" design to another level by including metal motif beads in the stack. This adds a greater metal presence to your piece and is an easy way to give your earrings fall vibes. As you can see, I like using leaf shaped beads for fall earrings, but any metal shape you like can add extra shine and interest to your stack. As a variant on this design, use a motif shaped bead in colored glass, etc., instead of or in addition to metal ones.

Earring Design #4: Skinny Stack

Make your stack long and skinny by using a larger number of small beads (6mm and below) to create a stack that swings. Keep them relatively plain or make them ornate by stacking with fancy spacers, bead caps, etc. You can also include fall motif shaped metal or glass beads to amp up the autumnal vibe, as I have done with owls and leaves.

source: carrier.com

Earring Design #5: Very Skinny Stack

Earring Design #6: Stick Fringe

The skinny stack reaches its logical stopping point with these two designs. I like to use beads in the 3-4-5mm range to create very skinny single stack earrings with strong vertical integrity. I find that these designs look great when the same/similar beads are repeated, as opposed to the more varied look of the earlier designs. The very skinny stack is a great way to use disk shaped beads (left) or an odd shaped bead stacked on top of itself (center). You can also make a very skinny stack with seed beads, though I personally prefer to put multiple very skinny seed bead stacks together to create a stick fringe design (right).

Earring Design #7: Bead(s) and Bead Dangle

For extra movement in the earring, dangle designs have two sections: a top beaded portion on an eye pin and a bottom beaded portion on a head pin. You can pair two statement beads together (top row) to make a statement times two. Or you can create a multi-bead stack on top and dangle either a single bead (bottom left & center) or another small stack (bottom right) below it.

Earring Design #8: Bead(s) and Motif Bead Dangle

As we saw with the stack designs, metal or glass motif shaped beads can also be used to good effect in dangle designs. Note that up until now, we have been focusing on "normal" beads that are drilled through the center and can easily be stacked on top of each other (such as the top left pair and all in the bottom row). But with dangle designs, you can also use beads that are drilled sideways across the top of the bead as the lower dangle (like the leaves in top center and right). See here for instructions on how to wire wrap a top drilled bead like these leaves.

Earring Design #9: Metal Motif and Dangle

Earring Design #10: 3 Piece Dangle

Our final two designs are variants on the dangle theme. You can give your dangle earring a more metal-heavy look by substituting a metal shaped bead in the top and/or bottom sections of your earring (left). If you want to get even more jangle in your dangle, you can create a 3 piece dangle (right). The only limit to how many sections of beads you loop together in your earring is how long you are comfortable with your earring being! 3 is probably my personal maximum for larger beads, but with tiny ones, I could handle more.

Thanks for joining me today for a discussion of fall jewelry selection tips and 10 DIY bead earring designs with fall-forward examples from my collection.

Next month's topic is How I Take Care of Myself When I'm Sick...and that is not a subject I'm looking forward to! But I will rally myself to think about it.

In the meantime, visit these lovely bloggers as they share about their top 10 things they can't live without:

Bettye at Fashion Schlub

Daenel at Living Outside the Stacks

Em at Dust and Doghair

Iris at Iris’ Original Ramblings

Jodie at Jodie’s Touch of Style

I am sad to report that Leslie at Once Upon a Time & Happily Ever After has made the very difficult decision to close down her blog, so she is no longer writing on the themes for this series. But I can hardly say that she's left the group because we like her and care about her too much to say goodbye! I will take the lead of academia - where a former holder of a professorship who has performed with distinction retains their title as an honor upon retirement - and call her Leslie, blogger emeritus at Once Upon a Time & Happily Ever After.

What are your top 10 things you couldn't do without? Do you like to lean into fall colors, motifs, etc., when it comes to clothing and jewelry at this time of year? How about fall home decor? Do you have a favorite fall color or fall motif?

Blogs I link up with are listed here.