Holiday Faux Leather Earrings fun

I decided to make holiday-themed earrings for myself. For Halloween, I used orange faux leather and black Heat Transfer Vinyl (HTV) to make some pumpkins. 

It's really easy to make these designs - simply cut out the pumpkin shape in faux leather, then cut out the HTV and press it on using an iron or Cricut EasyPress 2. Cricut has a guide that tells you what temperature to set and how long to press the HTV for perfect application. 

This shows the back of one of the pumpkin earrings. I applied orange HTV to the back of my faux leather to help prevent the earring from curling and also to hide the ugly back side of the faux leather. Application is the same as for the front. 

This design was done with holographic HTV on black faux leather. I know it doesn't look black in the photo, but it is. I like the way the holographic HTV takes on the colors of nearby objects. The design is from a set of Wine Earrings from Creative Fabrica. This set of designs shows up very large in Silhouette Studio, so it had to be resized to 2" tall before cutting. As you can see, some of the lines are very thin, so using HTV for the main part of the design works best to ensure that the details are visible.

I moved a bit to the side and re-photographed the same earrings. This time they have taken on the colors of some print material that I had nearby - so you see lots of pink and green in them. Very cool. I plan on making more earrings using this holographic HTV. 

I also cut a second set of earrings from the same Wine Earrings design set as above. This one I cut out the design in black faux leather and then cut out a second teardrop in pink glitter faux leather. Since the pink glitter faux leather has a white canvas back side, I applied purple glitter HTV to the back to cover it. 

I edited this design slightly: after cutting it out with my Silhouette Cameo 4, I realized that the wine stem was so narrow that it pretty much disappeared from view. I used scissors to trim off a very narrow strip on either side of the stem to make it wider. I'm considering trimming the wavy top either straight across or on a slight curve because I don't think the wavy top looks like wine sitting in a glass.  

These ADORABLE gingerbread men are FREE designs from Amy Romeu. Click on the link for her tutorial on how to make them using faux leather and HTV. I used white glitter HTV, red holographic HTV, and pink regular HTV on mine. These go together surprisingly easily and Amy's tutorial covers all the step you have to perform to make them look great. 

These Penguins are another FREE design from Amy Romeu. Click on the link for her tutorial on how to make them. I made mine using white glitter HTV, red holographic HTV, green glitter HTV, plain yellow HTV and black faux leather. These are also very easy to make and they weed perfectly. 

I had originally cut only one pair of penguins, but then I realized that I had two with the scarves to the right, so I returned to my machine and cut another pair....but this time I put the leather on the mat flipped over, which meant I wound up with all penguins having scarves to the right. D'oh! I'm out of black faux leather, so I'll have to stick with what I've got. And they're totally adorable so I don't care that they aren't mirrored penguins.

These Snowmen are also FREE designs from Amy Romeu. Click on the link for Amy Romeu's tutorial on how to make them. I used white faux leather, green glitter HTV, red holographic HTV, orange regular HTV and black regular HTV to make mine. I will note that the biggest challenge was dealing with the little black dots for the mouth. When weeding the black, I had to use my pointy dental tool to hold down each dot as I weeded out the surrounding material. I was reasonably successful on three of them, but on the last one, the mouth turned out a bit crooked because a few dots got away from me. I think that snowman was the first one I weeded and since I hadn't known to expect to have to fight with the dots the dots got away from me. It's cute anyway so it doesn't matter. 

HAPPY CRAFTING!