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Hex Nut Earrings
It was sometime after I got my finger cut up from wearing a hex nut as a ring that I decided I needed a different way to make the things into ReBoot jewelry. It took me a couple years to get around to it, but I finally did!

YOU'LL NEED:

  • 2 gold fish hook ear wires (That's what I used, but posts or clip-ons would work, too.)
  • 2 small brass hex nuts
  • 4 gold jump rings (big enough to loop through your hex nuts with a little room to spare)
  • colored pencils
  • scissors
  • 1/8" hole punch
  • clear or white shrink plastic (such as Shrinky Dinks)
  • oven, baking sheet, and anything else your package of shrink plastic says you need
  • the Hex's mask pattern, or your favorite picture of Hex's mask

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Print out the Hex's mask pattern, or your favorite picture of Hex's mask scaled down to about the same size.

2. Lay a piece of shrink plastic over the mask picture. Make sure you can see the design through the plastic. (You may need to use a little sandpaper on your shrink plastic if the surface is very smooth. The package will have instructions.)

3. Use colored pencils to trace the mask design onto the plastic. If you're using clear shrink plastic, you'll need to fill in the background. If you're using white shrink plastic, you won't.

4. Cut out the traced mask, leaving an extra semicircle of plastic at the top. Punch a hole through the middle of the semicircle with the 1/8" hole punch.

5. Repeat the previous steps to make another mask on shrink plastic. (Give the second mask a different expression, if you feel like it.)

6. Shrink both masks according to the directions that came with the plastic. Don't forget to watch them curl up in the oven, because that's the best part of using shrink plastic!

7. Assemble your earrings: Put a jump ring through the hole in the top of Hex's mask, and connect it to a hex nut. Put a second jump ring through the hex nut, and connect that ring to the ear wire. Repeat for the second earring.

8. Wear the earrings. Get funny looks. Create chaos, if at all possible.

Happy, happy, happy!

Variation: You can use pretty much the same method to create a charm bracelet. Make shrink plastic masks with several different expressions. Use jump rings to attach the masks and a few hex nuts to a bracelet chain.

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