Today I tackled one of those jobs that I have been putting off for far too long. I mean, look at the state of my jewelry just this morning:
I know. How could I let it get that bad, right? But I have been working on a good excuse for some time now. Are you ready to hear it? Pickle Mickle happens to love playing with my jewelry. It's a great way to occupy her for a few minutes, but it wasn't doing my jewelry any favors. Isn't that a great excuse? It puts the blame on someone too little to be held accountable, and makes me look like a hero for giving her such an occupying activity. Oh, and I look selfless, to boot -- sacrificing my beloved jewelry for an even more beloved child. Sigh... If only all my excuses were so great. Anyway, it was time to do something about it. Finally. And I dreaded it.
My jewelry organizer needed to be really cheap. Like the "free" kind of cheap. So I went scavenging through my stash of "Previous Project Leftovers". I found an old bulletin board, some silver spray paint, and some silver fabric. I also found some hat netting and some beads for embellishing. I knew I didn't want a busy fabric or much embellishment because all that jewelry would look busy enough in a hurry. I just needed something simple and effective. And high enough that Pickle Mickle couldn't reach it anymore.
I spray painted the frame of the bulletin board. Then I cut a piece of silver fabric to fit the cork board part and mod podged it to the cork. If you've got Mod Podge and spray paint, you can fix anything. Seriously. We should be shipping boxes of this stuff to all the places of conflict in the world. After a few days of spray painting and mod podging, there would suddenly be world peace. And if that didn't work, they could spray paint and mod podge each other. After all the giggling that would ensue, it would be hard for them to kill each other. But I digress. Maybe this is why they haven't called me to solve the world's problems...
When my fabric dried, I attached some hat netting, cord and beads to the board. Then I just used clear colored tacks to hang up the jewelry, which was surprisingly less tangled than I thought. The whole project only took maybe 45 minutes.
I had some little silk bags, so I sorted my earrings by color into the bags and hung them with tacks. The bags slip right off the tacks, so it should be easy to get the earrings in and out of the bags. (First rule of organization -- it has to be easy to get out and put away, otherwise you won't actually do it and things will descend into chaos again.)
I attached another piece of hat netting to the side of the board to hang hook-type earrings. Hat netting has large holes, so it is easy to get the hooks in and out.
If you want to get fancy, tutorials for these kinds of jewelry organizers abound online. A quick search through Pinterest will probably turn up thousands that are far more beautiful than this. But I wanted super simple and super free. And, TA-DA. I can actually find my jewelry now. What a deal.
