Thrift Shop Earring Hairclips

Technically speaking, the earrings I used for this project weren’t from a thrift shop. They actually came from a sale run by Jewelry for Missions, a charity that sells donated jewelry to raise money for missions. Each piece is $2, but this time around they also had bags of jewelry starting at $8. Sort of a gamble, because the only idea you have of what’s in there is a glimpse through the sides of a Ziplock, but if you find five or ten items you love then it’s totally worth it.

Plus I can’t resist a good surprise. Going through those bags with Rachel was like Christmas.

Anyway, I found some cool clip-on earrings buried amidst piles of bulky plastic jewelry.

But clip-on earrings pinch. And Rachel’s really inspiring, because she’s all about DIYing her thrift store finds, which is not something I’d normally think to do. So I decided to make my earrings into hairpins.

And it turned out to be super easy. You really don’t even need a tutorial.

But I wrote one anyway.

1. Remove the clip.

At first I thought I’d try one earring with the clip still attached and the other with the clip taken off, to see what worked better. Let’s skip ahead to the conclusion of this experiment: clip attached did not work. I’m pretty sure it would’ve gotten caught in my hair anyway.

2. Glue on a bobby pin.

The difficulty of this probably depends on what the backs of your earrings were like. I thought it’d be pretty hard with these, since the clips I removed provided the only flat surface for gluing, but nope! Just dab a little Gorilla glue at the points of contact for the bobby pin and attach it with the curvy side down.

Here’s the bit where the earring with the clip didn’t work out. The other earring set perfectly, but the bobby pin on the clip earring kept sliding out of place. Plus glue gummed up between its front and back. Luckily, I was able to scrape it clean and start over–without the clip.

3. Look AWESOME.

That’s it. Two steps, because you already had this one figured out. Look how awesome these looked in my hair.

Fashion win. I’ve got to get back to my bag o’ jewelry and see if there are any more earrings secretly dreaming of becoming hairpins.