Ugly Sweater Earrings

These ugly sweater faux leather earrings are perfect for your next ugly sweater party!

I bet many of you already own an ugly sweater. Not a year goes by for me without an invitation to an ugly sweater party. This year I wanted to add a pair of earrings to the mix and I think these diy ugly sweater earrings will be perfect for this year’s party line up.

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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!

If you’d prefer to watch a tutorial, see my YouTube video below.

What You’ll Need:

Cricut Machine – I recommend the Cricut Explore Air 2 or the Cricut Maker.
Christmas faux leather pack from Amazon – I am having fun using these fun holiday patters!
Ugly sweater charms from Hobby Lobby
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 Mats – You need new or very sticky Cricut mats. The green mats work fine for this project because we’re using faux leather.

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 this project I am creating another set of earrings from the SVG cut file that I bought as part of a SVG earring bundle on etsy at GlamGirlSVG.

Pick the materials/colors for your faux leather earrings.

I linked my materials above. You could use any fun and crazy designs for ugly sweater earrings.

Open Cricut Design Space and start a new project to make your diy faux leather earrings.

Insert the earring cut file image.

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

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

Insert the cut file onto the canvas of your new project.

Click on the Images icon on the left.

Making snowman faux leather earrings on the cricut machine

Tip: to easily find my upload files, I usually filter by “uploaded.”

Select the cut file you want to use. Then, click on the insert image button in lower, right-hand corner. See the cut file for this project below (see blue arrow).

inserting image into Cricut Design space

This is what it looks like after being added to your project. It is a very large file. You can see the dimensions where the blue arrow points.

dimensions of an image in cricut design space

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. I am not going to re-size the circles. The largest one is at a height of about 2.5″ which I what I prefer.

Change earring components to the right color.

Changing the images to the right color keeps things clear when you’re putting different colors of leather and suede through the cutting machine.

Sometimes, the components are grouped together so you have to Ungroup them before you can change colors. (The Ungroup button is in the upper-right-hand corner.

We do need to Ungroup the circles in this project. Just click on the circles and then click on the Ungroup button. Once the circles are ungrouped, move the apart from each other.

Pointer to Ungroup button in Cricut Design space

Change the color of each circle to match the color of your material. This will help prompt you to put the right material onto the mat for each cut.

Click on the image and then click on the color box and select the color to turn it to.

Duplicate images, as needed

You will need to duplicate the circles to make the second earring in the pair. To do this, click on the item to select it. Then, click on the Duplicate button in the upper-right-hand corner.

You need to make one copy of the front earring and the middle earring.

Take a look at the back of the material for the back earring to see what the material looks like. Sometimes the back of faux leather isn’t very cute, and sometimes the back of the earring shows. For this reason, I typically cut an extra set of the backs so that I can glue the back pieces, back to back.

My back earring is the green glitter faux leather and it has a canvas material on the back. I duplicated two extra green circles so that I can glue them together.

MAKE IT

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

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

Mats ready to cut in Cricut Design Space

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.

When you’re using Cricut brand faux leather, this step is always easy because the settings are standardized and always work well for Cricut products. When using other brands of earring materials (like Hobby Lobby faux leather ribbon) it sometimes requires you to play around to get the setting right. This is sometimes frustrating. When I share my projects I’ll always share the settings that I learn work with the materials I am using for that project. Hopefully this will save time and wasted leather material for you.

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

Select Cricut Faux Leather if you are using a material from Cricut.

I used the Shimmer Leather option for all of the sheets in this project (all the sheets from my holiday pack that I bought on Amazon).

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 just in case you select a faux suede option (if you’re trying to cut through something thicker), I’m including this information in this post.

Make sure you’re using the right blade.

You can print faux leather, faux suede, and leather on the Cricut Explore. 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.

Since this project uses faux leather, you won’t need to change your blade (if you’re currently using the normal fine point blade).

Place the material on the cutting mat.

Before you put the faux leather or suede on the mat, you’ll want to look at the back of it to determine what is is made of. The back of these are often felt. This means that it will leave a mess of fuzz when you take it off of your mat if you place it on the mat right side up. For this reason, I normally place my material on my mats good side down (when they have a felt back).

However, for this project I cut two glitter faux leather sheets. Glitter is always messy so I put the glitter faux leather on my mat right side up.

Also, I like to determine how much of the leather or suede 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 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 suede or leather 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 leather/suede because I want minimize waste of the material.

making diy faux leather earrings in Cricut Design Space

Once I place my plastic on top of the mat, I put the material onto the mat.

After placing the material on the mat, you can use a Cricut Brayer roller to press the faux suede onto your mat. I don’t have one of those so I usually use a dough roller.

Continue placing the material (faux leather or faux suede) onto each mat and cutting the faux leather with the Cricut machine.

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 felt. I often cut an extra faux leather or 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 isn’t exposed.

To do this, I glue two earrings together using E6000 glue

While I didn’t use it for this project I actually prefer to use Crafter’s Pick Fabric glue because it doesn’t dry so fast and I have time to get my earrings situated/lined up better.

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.

Place a hole in the top of the earring.

This cut file already has holes so you don’t need to put holes into the earrings.

When my earrings don’t have 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. You can also use Cricut weeder tool to put a hole through faux leather and faux suede, but it is best to go through just one layer at a time if you do this.

Even when you have holes in your earrings, you often need your Cricut weeder tool and some scissors to get the hole out.

Using Cricut Weeder to poke hole out of the earring shape

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

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

For each earring, I always need one hook and two jump rings. This project will require an additional jump ring for each earring. This extra jump ring will be used to hang the ugly sweater a little longer in front of the earring.

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 a hook onto a jump ring for each earring.

My new best practice is to put a jump ring onto the hook and to close the jump ring. I do this before I even begin to put the earring components onto a jump ring.