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How to Make an Eye Pin
Eye pins are the little pins, with a little loop at the end, used in jewelry making. While creating some charms today, I was snipping the majority of the pin off to make it fit into the bead. I realized that at that rate, my 50 eye pins were going to be gone in no time, and I needed to conserve them. I started twisting my own eyes onto the scraps, making 3 eye pins out of just one eye pin. I'm sure if I just bought the right wire, I could just make my own eye pins every time.
Shopping List
- Pliers meant for jewelry making, including snips, flat heads, and some meant for curling wire.
- A long eye pin, head pin, or just some suitably sized wire.
Twisting the Eyes or Holes
Hopefully the pictures below are able to give you an idea of what I'm trying to illustrate. Unfortunately, my camera has no optical zoom to speak of. I used my boyfriend's shorts as the background, against his will and knowledge.
Steps by Picture
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For those who don't know what I'm talking about when I say eye pin, hopefully this will clarify. The hard to see hole is for stringing something, and the metal post is good for baking into clay or sticking beads on. Head pins come with little stops at the end, so you can hand three or four beads on them then twist your own eye. This is common when making hangy earrings.
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This is just a picture of the cookie charms I was putting the pins into, to illustrate why they're useful.
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After snipping off as much of the head pin as I needed to fit into the cookie, I had this much straight wire left.
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Come to think of it, I'm not sure what these pliers are called, but they're very useful. Grasp the end of the wire with the very tip of these, and gently twist them in a circle. The wire will start to wind into a circle.
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Once a full circle is formed, slide out the pliers.
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I ended up preferring the grip on my straight nose pliers for giving the wire the final little adjustment to center the eye (so it looked like an eye pin and not an over-twisted shepherds crook).
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It's really hard to see, but slide the plier tip into the wire circle. If you kept the circle nice and tight when twisting it, this can be hard. You want to grasp the wire on the long side, from inside the circle, and carefully bend the wire just enough to change the angle at which it meets the eye. Use the pliers to make sure the eye fully meets the wire and lays flat.
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This is just a picture of my completed eye pin. As you can see, it's slightly bigger than the one I got from dick blick, but I'm fine with that.
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