DIY Faux Leather Earrings - Curvy & Stacked

These stacked leather earrings have great shape and can be made with leather, faux leather, cork, or any combination of those.

I haven’t stopped making DIY faux leather earrings for weeks. I’m so busy making them that I’m having a hard time pausing to post pictures and record my projects in my blog. I really love the stacked earrings, especially when I do them in school colors. I made the ones shown above for my daughter, who is at Kansas State University. Scroll to the bottom to see several other curvy, stacked earrings that I’ve put together.

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

What You’ll Need:

Cricut Machine – I recommend the Cricut Explore Air 2 or the Cricut Maker.
Faux leather from Amazon – two faux leather kits I use are:
- 10 piece faux leather kit
  Amazon assortment of faux leather
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.
I often use these earring wire hooks with balls.
- Gold Plated
Cricut Cutting Mats – You need new or very sticky cutting mats.
- Standard Green Mats -use for faux leather, cork, and faux suede.
- Stronggrip Purple mats – use for genuine leather
Basic Cricut Tools
Leather hole punch (Larger holes, smallest is 2)
Leather hole punch – I just got this one and love it. The holes are smaller than the punch above. I use both, depending on the earring.
Earring Backs
Here is what I use to smooth my leather edges.

YouTube Video available

Watch the YouTube video below if you want to see how any part of the diy faux leather earrings project is done. I’m not going to write all of the steps for doing the work on Cricut in this post because those are in the video. Instead, I’ll share highlights about the project.

STEPS TO CREATE DIY EARRINGS

Select an earring template and upload it into Cricut design space.

You can find many templates for your earrings on Pinterest and Etsy. Many bloggers offer them for free and others are available for sale on the Etsy website.

This file from SVG Cuttables has a great curvy, stacked diy faux leather earring SVG. It’s part of a bundle that I had to buy because I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE so many of these earring designs. You’ll see me post many projects from this bundle in the weeks ahead.

Pick your materials/colors.

For the DIY faux leather earrings project shown in the photo above, I used three sheets of the leather from an Amazon faux leather kit that I purchased. Since my earrings are showing KSU spirit, I chose purple, white, and silver/gray. I LOVE the sheets of leather in this kit. They cut so nicely on my Cricut. Some faux leathers are hit and miss in how well they cut.

Start a new project in Cricut Design Space.

Open Cricut Design Space and start a new project.

Insert the earring cut file image.

Upload the cut file for this project.

I always recommend adding tags when uploading new files. If you think you’ll make a lot of earrings, add tags like “earrings” and “stacked earrings.” This will make it much easier when you’re looking for the file in the future.

Insert the cut file onto the canvas of your new project. Tip: to easily find my upload files, I usually filter by uploads.

Insert curvy, stacked diy earrings onto a Cricut canvas in Cricut Design Space

When you insert the file onto the mat, it appears as shown below.

diy earrings that can be made with faux leather, genuine leather or cork

It brings in a set of earrings that have holes and a set that don’t. You’ll need to delete whichever you don’t plan to use. I make the ones without holes so I need to delete the pair with holes.

These earrings come onto the mat with the longest earring being 2″ tall. I like that height and am keeping that height for my project

Delete the pair of earrings you’re not cutting.

These images come onto the mat grouped together, so you first need to Ungroup the earrings before you can delete anything. To Ungroup, click on the image to select it and then click on the Ungroup button.

To delete the extra earrings, press the left click while you draw a box around the earrings and then click on the X to delete the file.

Re-size the earrings, if needed.

I kept my earrings at the 2″ that the file come onto the mat as.

MAKE IT

Once your mat has all the earring components ready to cut, click on the Make It button to make the diy faux leather earrings.

On the left you’ll see the different mats that will need to be cut, one for each color of faux leather in your project.

diy earrings on a Cricut Canvas, ready to cut

Make sure you have the machine on the right material setting.

Turn your dial to custom.

Select the right material from the materials menu in Cricut Design studio.

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

making diy faux leather earrings on cricut machine

For the faux leather used in the diy faux leather earrings project shown above (in the kit linked above and here), I used a setting under the Leather Materials menu called Shimmered Leather and it worked great. It is the last option listed on the leather menu.

cricut design space for faux leather earrings

Make sure you’re using the right blade.

You can cut faux leather and genuine leather on the Cricut Explore. When cutting faux leather, you can use the Cricut standard fine point blade. If you’re cutting genuine leather, you’ll need to use the Cricut deep blade.

Place the material on the cutting mat.

I put the material onto the mat with the good side facing down.

Also, I like to determine how much of the mat/leather will be cut. Typically, it is just about 3″ of the mat. I then place my plastic mat cover back onto my mat about 3″ down from the top of the cutting area. I do this so that I don’t put the material on top of the mat where I’m not cutting it. This keeps me from losing the stickiness on my mat. I don’t like to pre-cut my material because I want minimize waste of the material.

When I was making these earrings, I was making many pairs so I just put the full piece of white faux leather face down onto the mat.

After placing the faux leather on the mat, you can use a Cricut Brayer roller to press the faux leather onto your mat.

using a Cricut brayer to roll genuine leather onto the Cricut mat

Continue placing the leather onto each mat and cutting the faux leather with the Cricut machine.

Glue earrings together, if necessary.

As I mentioned earlier, the back of some faux leather earrings aren’t very attractive. I often print extra faux leather for the piece on the back of a stacked earring and I glue a second piece to the back of it. This way if the earring turns, the felt isn’t exposed. To do this, I glue two earrings together using E6000 glue. You can also use a glue gun if you’d prefer.

For this project, I didn’t glue another piece to the back of my white earring because it just didn’t seem noticeable. I’ll include a photo from another project below in case you’re planning to glue pieces together.

gluing vinyl together for faux leather earrings

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

Using a pair of sharp scissors, trim fuzz from around the earrings.

Place a hole in the top of the earring.

I use a leather punch to put the holes in my earrings when the cut file doesn’t already have a hole. This tool cuts through multiple layers of the earring at the same time. These earrings already had a hole so I didn’t need to do that.

You can also use the your Cricut weeder tool to put a hole through the faux leather.

Gather necessary earring components and tools.

It doesn’t take much to put together earrings. You either need a couple of pairs of pliers or a jump ring tool and one pair of pliers. 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. Great for you if you’re getting started and a great gift for anyone that likes to DIY

Open the jump ring.

A jump ring isn’t closed. This means with the right tools, you can open it to put on the earring components.

These are the two tools that I use to open and close my jump rings. They’re both in this awesome starter kit.

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 the pieces of faux leather onto the jump ring.

Put the earring hook onto the jump ring. Be sure the hook is placed on the jump ring facing the right direction.

Using the pliers and jump ring tool, close the jump ring.

And that’s it! Your earring is done!

These faux leather earrings turned out so cute! I can’t wait to wear them!

Additional cute stacked, curvy diy earrings:

You’ll notice that I used different hooks on the earrings below. These ear wires with balls at the end are a little more expensive than the hooks above, but they’re so easy! A few options for these hooks are below. Also, I linked the materials that I used below each photo.