Bejeweled

I don’t have very much jewelry. I’m not a girlie girl and I don’t accessorize often. But I do like to gussy it up now and then and one thing I know is that if things are easily accessible, they are used more often. I was excited about my tackle box used as a travel jewelery case, which I mention here. However, my jewelry downfall is that all of my stuff was stored in little boxes or baskets all the time. I never saw it, so I never wore it. Enter the jewelry board project!

I wanted a pretty place to at least hang my necklaces and maybe a few bracelets. So I started the materials search. I found a cute frame at Goodwill for $4.99. I probably could have found one cheaper, but it was the right size and I found it right away, so I snagged it! And it already had the picture wire on it so I wouldn’t have to worry about how to hang it. I knew that I had some squares of cork at home that I had already bought, so between those two things, I was off to a good start.

Then I cut the cork to fit and actually stapled 2 pieces together to make 1 piece for the frame. I wanted to cover the cork in a pretty fabric, but instead of buying material, I shopped my house! I had an adorable shirt that I never wore because when I put it on I felt like I was 5 years old….

Forgive all of the wrinkles….I dug this puppy right out of the ‘Donate’ bag in my laundry room. So I just cut off the back of it to wrap around the cork board. However, it was so thin, you could see right through it. Soooo….I cut a piece of material out of a sheet that I had paid a couple bucks for with just something like this in mind. First I wrapped the sheet around the cork and then the yellow fabric from the shirt. I stapled them at the back so they wouldn’t shift.

Now that’s not very pretty, but I knew that it was the back and I was also going to cover it with a piece of cardboard.

I knew I was going to stick pushpins in the board, so I tried to get all cutesy. Big mistake. My plan was to take some leftover textured spray paint and give them all this great textured finish. Um….here’s what happened:

Riiiiiight. If you remember from my post on making plastic Bag Holders, this whole spray paint thing didn’t work out so well for that project either. So, I just found some clear push pins that would work just fine. Back to the frame…..

I actually liked the color of the frame, but the shade was a little too close to the color of the yellow fabric, so I painted the frame gray and then sanded it a little to lightly distress it:

Here’s what it looked like at this point. Cute, but a little boring:

So I added a few embellishments that I dug out of the hardly used scrap booking supplies:

Once I added the jewelry, I ended up covering a lot of the embellishments, so I actually moved almost all of them to the frame and …Ta Da!

The whole thing cost about $7.00 between the frame and the cork. I already had the material, leftover paint, sandpaper, staples and tacks. Yea!

Lessons learned:

1) If you are going to do a project like this, buy thicker cork or be prepared to double up the sheets. A standard tack was too long for the cork I had so that’s why I put cardboard behind it to make it thicker.

2) If you want to be able to rearrange the tacks or pushpins, use a durable fabric that can handle a little wear and tear. The fabric I used was extremely thin and fragile, but I knew that once the pushpins  were in, they were going to stay.

3) DO NOT try to spray paint pushpins 🙂

~Erin