Zippers are fun crafting supply and people have used them to make a variety of jewelry pieces. I wanted to try to make some earrings and decided to start simple with these fun zipper earrings that are made by trimming zippers and wrapping embroidery floss around them. They are fun and easy to customize with the huge variety of embroidery floss.

Supplies

Supplies:

Zipper - for aesthetics, I recommend ones that have visible teeth (so not invisible zippers)
Embroidery Floss - I think variegated ones work well here
Cord Ends
Earring Hooks - I prefer surgical steel

Tools:

Fray Check
Scissors
Jewelry or just needle nose Pliers - I like to have 2 to help pry the cord end open

Any Amazon links are Amazon Associates links.

Step 1: Cut and Prep Zipper

Start by making sure your zipper is clean and dry. When I rinsed mine, it actually bled some blackish color and I'm not sure if it's because the zipper is second hand or if it's because it looks like it has weird black marker on one side or not. But get that mess out before you move on. Us a little soap and water and let it dry before you use it.

Next, decide how long you want the earrings to be. I tested it out and ended up doing about 12.5cm.

Making earrings works nice because you just cut both sides at once and you have two equal earrings.

Once cut, make sure you get the zipper stopper off the end if you have it, and then trim the fabric off the zipper. You want it thin enough that it will look nice bent, but I also wanted to leave a sliver so you could see that color of the zipper come through.

Finish it off by fray checking the edge so the fabric doesn't fray.

Step 2:

Now it's time to wrap. Pick out the embroidery floss you want.

Seperate the floss in half (depending on what you are using it will probably be 3 strands). Tie it to one end of the zipper (do the very end, I did a couple teeth in but do it between the last two teeth) and carefully wrap it around the zipper.

When you get to the other end, tie it and cut off the floss.

To get it to stay, fray check the string on each end.

You should have the other 3 strands left, wrap those around the other earring. This works out great as the earrings will match if you used variegated floss.

Step 3: Finish the Earrings

You can choose the best way to finish them, but after a few differnet tries, I found the best way was to bind the ends of the zipper together using a leather cord end. I needed one big enough and the biggest I could find that I liked the look of were 5.5mm diameter on the outside and 4.5mm diameter on the inside.

Using pliers (I used two jewelry pliers) carefully pry the cord end open. Place in your zipper ends so they are in far enough without sticking out the top. Carefully pinch it closed the best you can. Even with this wider cord end, I had to overlap the zippers on top of each other so I just made sure my earrings were mirror images of each other because that's what I like.

Once they are done, attach the earring hooks and you're done!.

Step 4: Other Attempts

I didn't get a picture of both attempts, but first I tried to wrap the zipper tops with crochet thread and put a jump ring through it, but that got messy and ugly (as shown)

Second, I tried to wrap wire around it as show in this video I found on Youtube, but the zipper teeth got in the way and it was also messy and ugly.

So there are other options out there, but they may not all end up as nice as the cord end.