DIY tree earrings with a Cricut

Make these festive tree earrings with faux leather or cork sheets.

I love these dangling tree ornaments. These Christmas diy tree earrings are much easier to put together than they look. Grab your favorite faux leather or cork and your Cricut machine and you’re ready to DIY.

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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!

Details for making these Christmas tree earrings can be seen in my YouTube video below.

What You’ll Need for these DIY tree earrings:

Cricut Machine – I recommend the Cricut Explore Air 2 or the Cricut Maker.
I used this Christmas Tree Farm patterned cork to make the earrings shown above.
- Other great cork designs can be found here.
Heat Transfer Vinyl
- Black iron on vinyl
Earring supplies – 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.
Earring wire hooks with balls – I used this style of hook for these earrings. They’re super easy to use and the ball kind of looks like the star on the top of the tree.
Cricut Cutting Mats – You need new or very sticky cutting mats.
- Standard Green Mats work fine for faux leather, cork, and faux suede.
- Stronggrip Purple mats are needed if you’re cutting genuine leather
Basic Cricut Tools
Leather hole punch
Smaller Leather hole punch – this one punches smaller than 2mm
Earring Backs

HOW TO MAKE 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.

For these Christmas tree earrings, I used a file that I bought here.

Open Cricut Design Space and start a new project

Start a new project to make your Christmas tree earrings by clicking on the + icon.

Start a new project in Cricut Design Space

How to make faux leather earrings on a Cricut machine

Upload Image, if not already uploaded

Upload the cut file for this project, by clicking on the upload icon on the left and navigate to the file on your computer.

I always recommend adding tags when uploading new files. Pick word that you would type in if you were looking for the file. This makes it much easier when you’re looking for the file in the future.

Insert the cut file onto the canvas of your diy tree earrings project.

Click on the Images icon on the left.

Tip: To easily find my upload files, I usually filter by files that I have uploaded. Click on the Filter option.

Click on “Uploaded.”

Select the cut file you want to use. It will have a green box around it when selected. Then, click on the insert image button in lower, right-hand corner. If you purchase this file, you’ll see that you can chose to work with a file with or without holes. I used the file without holes.

Tip: I made a lot of these earrings and found that the best way to do the holes was to cut the template with holes on a piece of cardstock and use that for my template to cut the holes in my earrings with a leather hole punch. But when I cut the earring material, I cut the template without holes.

diy tree earrings on the canvas on Cricut Design Space

Once you’ve inserted the image onto the canvas, you can see the dimensions of the file you’ve inserted in the height and width field.

This is what the file for our diy tree earrings looks like after being added to the canvas. It comes onto the mat at about 2.6″ height.

Re-size the diy tree earrings, if needed.

It is often necessary to re-size earrings when the file is added to the canvas. An earring size is a personal preference.

For this project, I decided to make my trees 2″ tall. You can modify that number if you want your earrings bigger or smaller.

Duplicate images, as needed

Now it’s time to duplicate the image. Click the earring image and then click Duplicate in the upper right-hand corner to make your second earring.

Duplicate diy tree earrings on Cricut Canvas in Cricut Design Space

Prepare back of material, if desired.

Decide if you want to put something on the back of your material before you cut it. The back of cork and faux leather is often felt or fabric, and sometimes you may not like how it looks. You can either cut an extra earring and glue it back to back (I use this to glue pieces of material together) or you can may chose to do an iron on vinyl. In this project, I used a black heat transfer iron.

green and black buffalo check cork sheet

Cricut Easy Press

I used a Cricut Easy Press to apply heat transfer vinyl. Before owning an Easy Press, I used an iron. It works, but the easy press just does a much better job and it is easy to control the temperature. I love, love, love mine. For Christmas I want to get the mini one! Here are some Cricut Easy Press options.

Pre-heat the Cricut Easy Press

When you’re ready to use your Cricut, turn it on and set the temperature.

Cricut provides a guide with your easy press, but I always just look it up online whenever I’m doing a project. You can just google search “cricut easy press heat guide.”

Tap on the type of Cricut Easy Press that you’re using. Then select the heat transfer material you are using. Then select the type of base material you’re using (what you’re ironing onto). And finally, select whether you’re using the Cricut Easy Press mat or a towel. A view of the heat guide is shown below.

After tapping “Apply” it lets you know the temperature setting for the project based on your inputs. It also shares how long you should keep the press on your project and it tells you whether to remove the transfer material while it is warm or cool.

Here are some Cricut Easy Press mat options from Amazon.

Once the easy press is heated, place it on the Cricut Easy Press mat for about 5 seconds.

applying heat transfer vinyl (HTV) to the back of a sheet of cork to make diy tree earrings

MAKE IT

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

On the left you’ll see the mat with the shapes that will be cut. I turned my yellow so that the images would show up in my image. If you’re using a material that isn’t 12″ wide, you’ll need to move a few of the shapes that are on the right.

christmas tree diy earrings on Cricut mat

Set the Cricut machine on the right setting.

Turn your dial on your Cricut Explore to Custom. This lets you look at the long list of materials.

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

Making snowman faux leather earrings on the cricut machine

For your faux leather, if it is Cricut faux leather, you’ll select the Cricut faux leather option from the Browse materials menu.

If you’re using non-Cricut faux leather or a cork sheet that is less that 1mm (most of mine are between .8-1mm thick), the Shimmer Leather option normally works best.

Make sure you’re using the right blade.

You can cut faux leather, faux suede, cork, and leather on the Cricut Explore. When cutting Cricut’s cork, 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.

Place your material on the cutting mat(s).

Before you put the material on the mat, you’ll want to look at the back of it to determine what is is made of. I normally place my material on my mats good side down. The exception to this is when the good side is actually messier than the backside (e.g., glitter faux leather). The back side of the cork is a soft material so I’ll placed it on the mat cork side down.

Also, I like to determine how much of the material will be cut. Typically, it is less than 3″ of material, meaning only about 3″ of the mat needs to be exposed. I then place my plastic Cricut 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.

Once I place my plastic on top of the mat, I put the material onto the mat, face down (good side down).

putting cork sheet onto green cutting mat

After placing the material on the mat, you can use a Cricut Brayer roller to press the material onto your mat. The photo below is of me using a Cricut roller on a piece of genuine leather on a Stronggrip mat.

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

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

Using a pair of sharp 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 the back of the earring around the edge.

Punch holes in the earring.

In my YouTube video you’ll see me estimating where the holes should go in my tree earrings diy project. However, after making many of these earrings I decided that making a template on card stock with holes (by cutting the image of the file with holes) was easier and faster. I just lined up the piece to my cork or faux leather and punched the hole in my material with a leather punch.

Gather necessary earring components and tools to finish your diy faux leather earrings.

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

Opening jump rings

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.

Putting earring components into a jump ring.

We’re almost done with our Christmas tree earrings. You will use jump rings to connect the sections of the tree together.

Putting hooks on your earrings

I decided to use these wire hooks with balls on these earrings. They’re just so easy to use. I’ve linked some options above on Amazon, but I got the ones below at Hobby Lobby.

You can put the hole through the bead on the end or you can thread it through the opposite end of the wire.

Punch the hole for your hook. You can actually use the smaller hole punch and thread the earring onto the opposite end of the hook. I used a 2mm hole, which worked fine. But, when I made more of these, I ended up using the smaller punch.