4th of July Leather Earrings

Make these patriotic earrings by cutting leather and chunky glitter sheets on your Cricut machine.

These 4th of July leather earrings are made with leather and chunky glitter faux leather. They’re super easy to make by cutting the leather and faux leather on your Cricut machine. You can easily cut all of these materials on your Cricut Explore Air or Cricut Maker. Cut the leather materials and add earring jump rings and hooks and you’re ready to go.

My website contains affiliate marketing links, which means that when you make a purchase after clicking my links, I may receive a small commission for any sales made from links you click on. This doesn’t change the price you pay for the items.

Check out my favorite diy earring essentials on Amazon here!
Check out my favorite diy earring materials on Amazon here!

No time to DIY? Buy these earrings HERE at my etsy shop.

4th of July Leather Earrings YouTube Video Available

Details for making these 4th of July leather earrings can be seen in my YouTube video below. This blog post doesn’t include the Cricut Design Studio tips, so be sure to watch the video for those steps (and other key tips).

4th of July Leather Earrings Supplies

Materials I used for these patriotic earrings:
- Red with white stars chunky glitter
- Blue genuine leather
Cricut Machine – I recommend the Cricut Explore Air 2 or the Cricut Maker.
Earring supplies – earring hooks, jump rings, pliers, jump ring tool. This is the kit that I bought on Amazon and love it! It has a bundle of faux leather sheets as well as all of the tools you’ll need to make earrings.
Cricut Cutting Mats – You need new or very sticky cutting mats.
- Standard Green Mats -for faux leather, cork, and HTV.
- Stronggrip Purple mats – for genuine leather
Basic Cricut Tools
Cricut Brayer
Huge Cricut tools Bundle
Leather hole punch (Larger holes, smallest is 2)
Leather hole punch – This leather punch makes much smaller holes than the one above.
Leather Scissors
Here is what I use to smooth my leather edges.
Crafter’s Pick Fabric glue or Aleene’s fabric glue
Heat and Bond
Cricut Transfer Tape, Strong Grip
Cricut Transfer Tape, Standard Grip
Earring Backs
Earring Cards
Plastic bags for earrings

SVG File

You can find many templates for your earrings on Design Bundles, Pinterest and Etsy. Some bloggers offer them for free and others are available for sale on various websites.

For these 4th of July leather earrings I used this SVG file. It worked out great!

Materials Cricut Settings

See notes above under each project photo to see what I chose for my material setting.

Click on the Browse All Materials link to see the menu of materials options on your Cricut.

When I use non-Cricut faux leather, the Shimmer Leather option normally works best for me.

Selecting a material from the Browse all materials menu on Cricut Design Space for your Cricut machine

For this project, I used genuine leather to cut the blue genuine leather material. I also use the genuine leather setting when I use Heat n Bond to adhere two thicker pieces of faux leather together before I make my cuts.

To cut the red and white chunky glitter faux leather, I used the Bonded Denim material setting. You can just type “denim” into the search box.

Earring size

I love these pinched leather earrings! They have a narrow earring size which creates such a classic look. For these earrings, I set my height to 2.5″ tall by 1″ wide.

Star Wheels

The Cricut machine has star wheels to keep materials from shifting during cutting. However, when cutting thicker materials, the star wheels can leave track marks. When you select a material from the browse menu that is thicker, the Cricut machine will prompt you to move the star wheels to the right. Be sure to move the star wheels when cutting genuine leather so that you don’t get track marks on your genuine leather.

Cricut Blade

Make sure you are using the right blade.

You can cut faux leather, faux suede, cork, and leather on the Cricut Explore Air and Cricut Maker. When cutting Cricut’s faux leather and faux suede, you can use the Cricut standard fine point blade. If you’re cutting genuine leather, you’ll need to use the Cricut deep blade. When I cut my red and white star glitter sheet, I used my fine point blade. When I am working with a really thick glitter sheet, I do sometimes change to a deep cut. I didn’t find that to be necessary with this red and white stars glitter sheet.

Placing material on the cutting mat(s)

The approach you use to place the material on your mat plays a big role in your material cutting success.

How to get the material to stick to mat?

Using an extremely sticky mat is one of the most important keys to get a good cut in the leather. Some people attach the material to the mat with tape. I’m not a big fan of this because while it keeps the leather down on the edges, this approach doesn’t help the hold on other parts of the leather. For this reason, you won’t see me use tape very often.

That said, I always use tape any time I am cutting chunky glitter faux leather. I do this because the chunky glitter faux leather will not stick to the mat, regardless of how sticky the mat is. I usually use painters tape; however, since I was out of painters tape, I used transparent tape and it worked fine (although, I hate pulling transparent tape off of my mats as it really sticks).

Regardless of the material type, I always start by putting transfer tape on my mat. This approach keeps my mat clean and it also holds the material down really well (with the exception of glitter sheets) because it’s super sticky .

I use strong grip transfer tape for more challenging cuts and standard grip for other cuts. And sometimes I even use contact paper from the Dollar Tree. Dollar Tree contact paper does not very strong so I only use it on materials without stretch and cuts that don’t have center cut outs.

I find that the center cutouts in earrings create a lot of pull on the material and I need something strong holding the material on my mat during the cut. I cut a piece of transfer paper the size of my material and put it on the mat.

Leather face down or face up?

My answer: it depends.

I used to always face my materials on the mat with the good side facing down. But a lot has changed for me over the years, and more specifically recently as I’ve begun to cut more printed and soft textured leathers.

There is nothing worse than buying beautiful printed leather and pulling it up from your mat to find that some of the print has pulled off. For this reason, I’ve begun to place these items (printed leathers) onto my mat with the good side facing up. But beware, if you don’t have transfer tape on your mat you will leave a BIG mess behind.

For chunky glitter, I place my faux leather glitter sheet onto the mat with the glitter side facing down and then tape the piece onto the mat.

putting glitter faux leather onto cricut cutting mat

I placed my blue leather on the mat with the front side facing up and the suede leather back side facing down. I’m not sure why I did it this way and I typically wouldn’t place the front side down. It cut great!

Using a Cricut Brayer

After placing the material on the mat, I always use a Cricut Brayer roller to press it nicely onto your mat. Again, getting a good stick of the leather onto the mat is SUPER important for a good cut.

cutting blue teardrops for 4th of july earrings

stars glitter faux leather cut into teardrops

Making Earrings Two Sided

The back of some faux leather and faux suede earrings aren’t very attractive because they are often canvas or felt. I often cut an extra faux leather or faux suede piece for the back of the earring and I glue a second piece to the back of it. This way if the earring turns, the felt or canvas isn’t exposed.

There are two approaches I take to do this.

Sometimes I cut the earrings and then glue them back to back. To do this, I glue two earrings together using either Crafter’s Pick Fabric glue or Aleene’s Fabric Glue.
I glue two pieces of faux leather or cork sheets together using Heat n Bond BEFORE I cut the leather. This is my new FAVORITE way to work. By gluing them together before I cut, my cuts are beautiful and it saves me a ton of time.

Trim any felt, fuzz, or glue from the earrings.

Using a pair of leather scissors, trim fuzz from around the earrings. Be very careful not to cut any of the earring, you’re only cutting the fuzz off of your leather earrings.

You can also smooth the earring by using this burnishing agent. I apply it with a tooth pick along the edges. It’s great because it smooths the leather and helps better define the edges.

Place two holes in the top of the earring.

I use a leather punch to put the holes in my diy leather earrings. The tool linked above cuts through multiple layers of the earring at the same time and punches larger holes (2mm is the smallest) . Here is an option for a smaller hole leather punch (on this one 2mm is the largest hole it punches).

I made a template for the holes by cutting a set of the earrings with holes on card stock.

I placed the card stock template on top of the earring and punched holes through the card stock template.

cutting holes in pinched leather earrings

Open the fish hook earring

The basic fish hook earrings below are easy to work with. These are my favorite choice for pinched leather earrings.

You either need a couple pairs of pliers or a jump ring tool and one pair of pliers to work with the jump rings and earring hooks. You can get the two tools below along with a full kit of earring hooks and jump rings AND sheets of faux leather in this inexpensive DIY earring kit on Amazon. It is the perfect starter set and a great gift for anyone that likes to DIY.

The jump ring tool and pliers below come in the kit linked above.

Open the hook

Take a close look at the loop closure at the bottom of the hook and figure out which side is the side that isn’t connected. You may need to lift the ball to see where the opening is.

Place pliers on one side of the bottom wire.

Then place another pair of pliers on the other side of it (the round circle at the bottom of the hook). Don’t place the pliers on the hook above the circle part.

two sets of pliers, one on each side of earring hook

Turn the pliers that is on the side of the circle that isn’t connected to open the loop so that you can put the earring onto the hook.

Set the two hooks aside.

Open two jump rings (one for each earrings).

A jump ring is a metal ring where the ends meet but are not welded together. This means that with the right tools, you can open it and use it to connect earring components.

When using jump rings, you must first which size of jump rings you want to use. When selecting a jump ring size, consider the impact it will have to the length of your earring hang. In addition, if you’re putting leather and other components into a jump ring consider the thickness of the material. Thicker materials may require a larger size jump ring.

For pinched earrings, I normally use a 6mm jump ring to create the pinch on my earring. The only exception is when I’m doing a single layer pinched earring with a very thin material. In those cases, I use a 4 mm jump ring.

Pick the color of jump rings that you’re going to use and find the location on the jump ring where the ends meet.

You’ll need to open the jump ring. These are the two tools that I often use to open and close my jump rings. They’re both in this awesome starter kit. Sometimes I just use two pairs of pliers.

I hold one side of the jump ring with my pliers. With my other hand, I use my jump ring tool to push one side of the jump ring back (to open). It is important not to open the jump ring by pulling them to the left and right. If you do it that way, it will be hard to close the jump ring, while keeping the shape. Instead, push the ring back/front to open the jump ring.

Note: If you’re using the jump ring tool, find the slot on the tool that is sized right for the jump ring.

Put your earring onto the 6 mm jump ring

Continue to hold the jump ring and place the left hole of the back earring onto to the left opening of the jump ring.

Then place the left hole of the front leather layer onto the same side of the jump ring.

This is where it gets a little tricky. It might be best to watch the YouTube video because it is hard to describe in writing.

I then fold the front earring forward and place the right hole back onto the same side of the jump ring. This can be challenging and I sometimes have to use my pliers to move my jump ring closer to the hole.

I watch along the back to see the jump ring poke back through the back of the earring. Once the front layer is on the jump ring, place the right hole of the back layer onto the same side of the jump ring as well. This one can also be a bit challenging.

Close the jump ring.

Once you get the jump ring through the entire earring as described above, use the two sets of pliers (or a set of pliers along with a jump ring tool) to close the jump ring.