Friday, June 14, 2013

Jewelry Display

I'm all sorts of behind on this, but here's my project from craft wars... like three weeks ago. 
I have been wanting to make a jewelry holder for forever. My jumbled tangle of necklaces and earrings was driving me crazy, plus I had them in an area where Logan could reach so he was constantly decorating himself and flinging my jewels all over the room. Ok, "jewels".

I went on the hunt for a frame and found just the thing at Salvation Army. The mirror came out easily and it already had a wire on the back so I could hang it without having to attach anything extra.


We were given fabric to use for this craft and it would have been so easy to just use a patterned piece that they gave us for the background. But no. I wanted mine to be different so I was like, yay! I'll paint some fabric and make one of those freezer paper stencils that everyone is talking about! Never done it before, but seize the day! What could go wrong?

I wanted a Moroccan style shape so I started drawing using my math skills to figure out proportions. When those failed me I used my eyeballing skills.
Yes, I used a cereal box to create my stencil.

After cutting out my main stencil I traced it approximately one billion times on my freezer paper.

And then I cut them out for one billion hours.


And. AND! After all my careful measuring, I decided I wanted the inverse of the stencil so I had to measure again as I laid individual pieces onto my fabric and ironed them down.

And then I spray painted my grey fabric white. Possibly I was high on fumes from spray painting my frame? Take a look at the picture above ^^ That is AFTER spray painting. Does that look white to you? I was pretty much sweating it out at this point. I guess this is why companies say to test in an inconspicuous area first, blah blah blah, I never worry about those things.

Soooo I went back and painted it by hand, worrying incessantly about the spray paint that had puddled and seeped under my stencils. This was my one piece of grey fabric by the way and I HAD to use fabric for this project so I was stressin.

Luckily the paint seepage was minimal and once I put it in my Salvation Army frame with wire mesh in front you couldn't really tell. Too much. Maybe a little. I had to move on.


I glued a random piece of moulding that I found in my garage to the bottom of the frame because I wanted a ledge to store rings and bracelets on and then I started brainstorming what I could use for knobs.

In a perfect world I'd run on down to Anthropologie and pick up a bunch of darling knobs, but, let's be honest, they are expensive. Pretty sure I was hoping my whole jewelry holder would cost less than one of those knobs. So, I decided to stick clear pushpins into the wood and then I made the knobby part out of those flat clear rocks with paper mod podged to the back. I used my favorite tough glue, e-3000, to stick them together. That's also what I used to attach the shelf to the frame. Heh.


Now I no longer need to use the "detangle-as-needed" method of jewelry storage, and I won't have to choose between being on time or having accessories. Yay!

Also, the jewelry hides my paint mistakes :)