DIY Jewelry Hangers: Pretty and Functional

So, I sort of have a jewelry storage problem.  It's not that I have too much jewelry - oh no no, of course not!  It's simply that I don't have enough space to store my massive collection*  ;-)

Tom had been offering to make me some sort of earring hanger for a long time, but I kept saying I was alright with what I was already using (an overflowing compartmentalized velvet-lined (a.k.a. total dust-magnet) tray).  Really, it just wasn't working well for me.  I had trouble finding whatever pair of earrings I was hunting for each morning, and many of them got buried (by other earrings or by dust?  I can't really say.) that they became forgotten.

Luckily, this past Christmas, my darling husband went out on a limb and decided to whip together a pretty frame for displaying my biggest earrings, and I realized how very handy it was.

It was an easy little project for him.  He "re-purposed" the wooden frame from a picture we no longer wanted (if you don't have one already sitting around, you can always find tons of ugly pictures at thrift stores for a couple bucks and just buy them for the frame), and painted it purple to match our bedroom colors.  Then he bought a small piece of wire mesh, cut it to size with tin snips, and used glazier's points to hold it on the back.  Easy peasy.

Close-up of the back so you can see how the glazier's points are pressed into the wood

It's been a great solution for organizing all my biggest earrings.  Now that I can see them, I've been wearing them all much more often.  It only works well for hook-back styles, though.  My smaller or post-back earrings still live in that dusty old tray.

After the success of the earring holder, I was looking for a good way to hang some of my necklaces as well.  In the old house, I had put a row of seventeen big nails in the wall to hang them from:

Old necklace storage

I didn't mind it, but Tom thought it looked sloppy, and asked me to please not make seventeen holes in the wall of our new house!  I kept trying to think of a better way to hang necklaces that would be practical but also in my style.  Eventually it hit me that I could combine my old nails-in-the-wall method with Tom's pretty frame idea.  What is marriage about, if not compromise, huh?

Behold my new necklace frame!

Ten holes now, not seventeen.  Are you happy, honey? :-)

This was incredibly easy  to make.  I searched thrift stores for awhile until I found a similar-looking wooden frame that was roughly the same size as the earring one.  I gave it the same purple paint treatment, and hung it up empty on the wall.  Then I just nailed nails right into the wall inside the space of the frame, and hung all my big necklaces from them.


And now both sides of my dresser match.

Please ignore those ugly peach walls (with matching peach trim around the doors- really, who does that?!) - I'm dying to re-paint them, but other projects are taking precedence right now

Thanks for reading about my little project.  I hope it inspires someone who might be looking for a way to display or organize their jewelry.



*Don't worry, I'm not a compulsive shopper - most of these were gifts from my mom or husband, over many years!