Valentine's Day Earrings DIY

Make these cute heart diy earrings with your Cricut machine and your leather.

These dangling heart earrings are perfect for Valentine’s Day. Make this Valentine’s Day Earrings DIY with faux leather or leather.

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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 Valentine’s Day Earrings DIY can be seen in my YouTube video below.

What You’ll Need to make this Valentine’s Day Earrings DIY:

Cricut Machine – I recommend the Cricut Explore Air 2 or the Cricut Maker.
Faux leathers used for this project:
- Red texture faux leather
- Gray and Pink, plaid and floral
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 used this style of hook for these earrings. 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
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.

For this Valentine’s Day earrings DIY, I used an SVG cut file that I bought on the Design Bundles website.

See my links to the materials below each photo.

Pink, black, and white plaid faux leather

Pink and gray floral faux leather

Red, texture faux leather

Open Cricut Design Space and start a new project

Start a new project to make this Valentine’s Day 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.

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 this Valentine’s Day Earrings DIY looks like after being added to the canvas. It comes into the canvas over 6″ tall.

Valentine's Day Earrings on a Cricut canvas

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, but I decided to make this heart 2″ tall.

You’ll want to decide the height of your earring based on personal preference.

Duplicate images, as needed

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

Flip any necessary images.

Decide if you want to flip one of the earrings horizontally. This just helps to balance the look of the earrings on each side.

Do flip an image, click on it to select it and then click on the Flip button.

Select Flip Horizontal.

Below you’ll notice the right earring is flipped.

Decide if you want to cut an additional set.

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 going to cut two additional hearts so that I can glue my back pieces back to back with another piece of material. I highlighted the teardrop and clicked Duplicate two more times.

That’s It. Your Valentine’s Day Earrings DIY is ready to cut!

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 Valentine’s Day 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 mirror.

Valentine's Day Earrings DIY ready to cut

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, 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 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 cut faux leather, faux suede, cork, and leather on the Cricut Explore 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).

Faux leather onto Cricut Standard Mat, good side facing down

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

faux leather cutting on a Cricut machine

faux leather hearts cut on 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 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.

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.

Gluing faux leather heart earrings together, front and back

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.

Place a hole in the top of the earring.

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.

I punched a hole in my first earring.

Then I stacked the earrings on top of each other and used my first hole as the guide to punch through the second earring.

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

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.

Put earrings and hook into a jump ring.

Then, I open another jump ring and put the earrings onto the open jump ring. After putting the earring onto the jump ring, add the hook, making sure it is facing towards the back. Using the pliers and the jump ring tool, close the jump ring.

Using a Hook with Wire Ball End

Lately, I’ve been using wire hooks with balls at the end. These hooks are super easy to use! You don’t need to use jump rings with this kind of hook. Just push the hook through the hole. If you’re interested in these, check out some options here:

Just push the earring through the hole.