Felted Wool Bead Earrings

I seem to have entered a crafting slump -- little time to craft and lots of long-term, on-going projects, so little progress to show. I did manage to make some earrings last week, however.

I wanted to make some more beaded felt ball earrings, but this time make the wool balls myself from woving, rather than buy them. A google search quickly found this great and easy tutorial from Knitty magazine. In an evening's work (and two days drying time), I had four pairs of felted wool beads:
(Unfortunately, the color in all the photos is off again -- the teal beads, for example, should be deep green.) The tip from the tutorial was to use toothpicks to make the holes, but at 11:00 on a Sunday night I had none, so I came up with the brilliant idea of using size 20 chenille needles. Brilliant, that is, until two days later when the beads were dry and I removed them from the needles -- not only were the holes quite a bit smaller than I wanted, most of the needles had rusted, rendering them useless for embroidery. Other than that, however, the process was very easy.

The next step was to string the beads onto headpins, with "silver" (the guy who sold them to me said they were silver, but English was not his first language and the price was very cheap, so who knows) spacer beads. Using thread to match the wool, I sewed on seed beads in different patterns:
(They look much prettier in person.) I made these with the intention of selling them, but I like the light bluey-green ones with pink daisy flowers so much, I may keep that pair for myself.

For completion's sake, the felt bead earrings I made in the fall with commercial wool beads: