These earrings are based on Karen Cabrera’s basic ankhar tutorial #105. Karen’s videos are brilliantly made, even though they’re backwards.
This is an elegantly simple design, made just with rings on a single shuttle. An 8mm bead is fixed to each earring as part of the finishing loop.
Use the Larks Head join to keep everything smooth. Again Karen Cabrera is my go-to for this technique, I use the original #85.
Use small, decorative sized picots. There needs to be enough room to allow two joins, but still keep everything in tight.
Don’t tat in the end at the beginning, use it to secure the bead and tension at the end.
R1: 16-8
R2: 10+10
R3: 8+8-8
Repeat R2 and R3 until there’s 5 of each
R11: 8+16
Cut the end long. Thread behind each front ring and through R1 to the back to cinch the curve down. Thread the bead on, loop over R11 and back through the bead. Tie to first thread and stitch in ends. The ends can also be threaded back through between the rings to give a little extra tension and height, and tied around the base of R11 then just snip off closely. Fix an earring hook around the final ring.
Make the second earring the same way. When finishing, make sure the rings overlap the other way around, and fix the earring hook to the other end.
Last year, I was attaching findings to picots. Unfortunately, the hooks I use seem to have too big of a gap to be securely attached to a mere picot and couple of my gifts wandered off by themselves. I've now taken to fixing the hooks around an entire ring, so there's no chance of them going anywhere and I don't have to worry about adding random picots.
The ankhar earrings pictured are made with #20 Milford Mercer in Black and 8mm glass beads.
