Leather Circle Earrings DIY

Make these leather earrings with a Cricut machine.

This leather circles earrings diy is a great starter project! The circles cut so nicely on both genuine leather and faux leather with a Cricut machine. You can cut both faux leather and real leather with the Cricut Explore, the Cricut Air 2, and the Cricut Maker. If you’re cutting with faux leather, use your normal, standard grip mat and the regular fine point blade. If you’re cutting leather, you do need the deep cut blade and the purple strong grip mat. In this tutorial, I’ll share how these earrings are made.

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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 this leather circle earrings diy can be seen in my YouTube video below.

What you’ll need to make this leather circles earrings diy:

Cricut Machine – I recommend the Cricut Explore Air 2 or the Cricut Maker.
Genuine Leather – Box of Genuine Leather Scraps from Amazon
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.
Earring wire hooks with balls – I use this style of hook a lot, but didn’t use them when I made these. I’m linking them here in case you prefer these hooks. They’re super easy to use and won’t require jump rings or jump ring tools/pliers.
- Gold Plated
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 deep cut blade
Leather hole punch (Larger holes, smallest is 2)
Leather hole punch – This leather punch makes much smaller holes than the one above.
Here is what I use to smooth my leather edges.
Crafter’s Pick Fabric glue or E6000 glue
Earring Backs
Earring Cards – I use these because they are tall enough that my earrings can fully hang while in the jewelry bags. If your earrings hang longer than your cards, they will not look as good when you put them into the plastic bags.
Plastic bags for earrings

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 Design Bundles, Pinterest and Etsy. Many bloggers offer them for free and others are available for sale on the Etsy website.

I used this cute circle earrings svg file for this project.

Open Cricut Design Space and start a new project

Start a new project to make this leather circles earrings diy 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 words that you would type in if you were looking for the file. This makes it much easier to search for the file when you’re looking for it in the future.

Insert the cut file onto the canvas of your new 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.

Insert image of diy leather earring onto the Cricut Design Space canvas by selecting the image

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 the leather circle earrings diy project looks like after being added to the canvas. The earrings comes onto the canvas at about 2.5″ tall.

leather earring comes onto the mat at 2.5" tall

Re-size the diy faux leather 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, so decide what size you’d like. I didn’t make a change to the size of these.

If you want to change the height, simply type the desired height into the H field as shown below.

Duplicate images, as needed

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

set of diy leather earrings on Cricut Design Space

Decide if you like the look of the back of your earring material and if you think it will show when the earrings are worn. I often cut a second set of the earrings for the back earrings and glue them back to back to cover any ugly felt.

For this project, I am using genuine leather with a beautiful back color and texture so I’m not cutting extra earrings.

If you need to duplicate additional earrings, do that now by selecting the earrings and clicking on Duplicate until there are 4 earrings on the mat.

MAKE IT

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

On the left you’ll see the mat that will need to be cut.

Mirror your design, if necessary

Since the good side of your material will almost always go onto the mat facing down, click on the Mirror toggle button. If the cuts on your mat are symmetrical (like they are in this project) it really doesn’t matter, but it’s probably a good idea to go ahead and click mirror any time your material faces down, as a good practice.

making faux leather earrings on a Cricut

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.

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

For this project, I used genuine leather, so I selected Genuine Leather from the menu.

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, the Shimmer Leather option normally works best.

Move the 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.

Push the wheels to the right. They may be on there tight so put some strength behind it. You won’t be prompted to do this step for faux leather, but I am prompted to do this because I’m making leather earrings and selected Genuine Leather from the menu.

Make sure you’re using the right blade.

You can cut faux leather, faux suede, cork, and leather on the Cricut Explore, Cricut Air 2, 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.

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).

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).

Place genuine leather onto the purple strong grip mat, with the good side of the leather facing down

After placing the material on the mat, you can use a Cricut Brayer roller to press it nicely onto your mat.

roll the Cricut brayer across the leather to press nicely onto the mat

Cut the earrings on the Cricut machine

genuine leather sheet on Cricut mat, where you can see the earring cuts on the leather

leather circle earrings diy after cut on Cricut Explore

removing the leather earrings diy from the cricut mat

Glue earring pieces together, if necessary.

As I mentioned earlier, 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.

For this project, I used genuine leather so I didn’t do that, but I’ll include info below for you if you’re using faux leather and want to do this.

To do this, I glue two earrings together using either Crafter’s Pick Fabric glue or E6000 glue.

Here are a couple pictures from another project.

Glue two glitter faux leather earring pieces together to make Valentine's Earrings diy

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 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. I didn’t need to do this with the leather I used for this project, but I’m putting a photo from another project in case you need to do it.

smoothing the edges of leather to control the flyaways

Place a hole in the top of the earring.

This earring svg file came with both options, holes and no holes. I had high confidence in my leather (that the holes would cut nicely) so I used the file with holes.

When I cut the earrings without holes, I use a leather punch to put the holes in my diy faux leather earrings. The tool linked above cuts through multiple layers of the earring at the same time. Here is an option for a smaller hole leather punch.

Below you’ll see a picture of me using the leather hole punch on a different project.

This is the punch with the smaller holes (I love this!)

punch hole in cross faux leather earrings

Decide which type of hooks you’ll use.

The basic fish hook earrings below are easy to work with. You can place an earring component directly into the circle on the bottom of the hook or your can use jump rings to dangle your earring components from your hook. Here is the great starter kit with these hooks.

These French hooks with balls are also easy to work with. You don’t need pliers or jump ring tools to work with these hooks. There are links to various colors at the top of this post.

holding earring hook, ready to put the faux leather statement earring on

Working with Earrings Hooks

It doesn’t take much to put together the first type of 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 and a great gift for anyone that likes to DIY.

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

Decide if you’ll use jump rings on the fish hook.

If you only have a single layer in your earring or you have a couple of earrings, you can chose to put the earring component right onto the opening at the bottom of the hook. If your components are too thick or you’d simply prefer to have more of a dangle, you can use jump rings. I’ll start by showing you how to put the earring components directly onto the hook.

If you want to put your earring directly on the the bottom of the hook, take a close look at it and figure out which side is the side that isn’t connected.

Place some 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.

Using Jump Rings

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

If you want to add jump rings, first decide which size of jump rings you want to use. A 4mm jump ring is good if you only have one item or a couple of thin items. A 6mm hold a bit thicker material. Gather up a couple of jump rings in the size you need.

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 a hook onto a jump ring for each earring.

If I’m using jump rings, I like to start by putting a jump ring onto the hook and then close the jump ring. I do this before I even begin to put the earring components onto a jump ring.

Earrings directly onto the hook

For this project, I put my earrings directly onto the hooks.

working with the earring hook to open it so that the leather earring can be placed onto the hook

Putting leather earring onto the earring hook

And that’s it! The leather circle earrings diy is finished!

So many options!

There are so many colors and designs you use for these earrings. I’ve placed a couple more examples below. These designs are all made genuine leathers from the genuine leather scraps kit I bought.

If you enjoy making diy earrings, check out my other posts below.

Everyday Earrings DIY

Sports

Football Earrings – Teardrop with football cut out
Stacked Football earrings
Chiefs Football Teardrop Earrings
Chiefs Heart Teardrop Earrings
Chiefs Arrowhead Earrings
Chiefs Arrowhead on Teardrop Earrings

My Favorite Leather

My Favorite Faux Leather

Valentine’s Day Earrings

St. Patrick’s Day Earrings

Winter-Themed Earrings DIY

Christmas -Themed Earrings DIY