A Pinterest Pin Done My Way

Lately I've been a little obsessed with Pinterest, a new site that lets you arrange the sites you bookmark like a pin board.  One of the projects I really liked was a way to organize and store earrings and I finally got around to doing it.

I made this one for Taylor, but I think I need one for me and Dee Dee is thinking she might need one as well.

To do this little project I painted a frame we already had.

Then, with Chris' help I stapled rug canvas to the back of the frame.  This was a little harder than I thought it would be because the squares were kind of big and my stapler kind of sucks. 

 Rug canvas is the material used for latch hook projects.  I originally had planned on using the plastic canvas used for cross stitch projects, which would have probably worked better.  Unfortunately I couldn't find a plastic canvas that would fit the frame I already had.  Since frames are expensive, I decided to get a little creative.  The rug canvas turned out to be a good choice.  The squares are large so it makes getting the hooks in easy and it's fairly stiff so the squares hold their shape while you are pulling on them to make the backing tight on the frame.

 

To hang the jewelry I used some fancy Christmas ornament hooks I bought on sale.   They are very pretty, but S hooks would have worked just as well, maybe better.  But they weren't just laying around my house like the ornament hooks were. 

At this point, I'm going to do a little bragging.  Everything you've seen so far, you probably have already seen on the net.  Maybe you've seen the next little step I did, but I don't want to hear this wasn't an original idea, so please don't tell me who thought of it first:)  Hook earrings weren't a problem, but I wanted Taylor to be able to hang her stud earrings as well.  (How twelve am I, the word "stud" makes me giggle).  To accomplish this I cut rectangles out of the aforementioned plastic canvas used for cross stitch.  I bought the canvas with the smallest holes available.  Then I ran a hook through the mesh of the plastic canvas and we put the earrings through the holes.  I was afraid that the small posts would slide right through, but they didn't.  

This was an easy sneezy project, I think it looks good and something that can be used for a long time. 

I need to do this for myself and the other girls in the house but one thing I would change is cutting the cloth a bit longer.  I was trying to accommodate the fact that this frame had a wire for hanging and didn't leave much material on the sides for stapling.  Next time I'm going to use a generous amount of material to make it easy to pull across the frame so there isn't any sagging.  It's easy enough to cut after you are finished stapling it all into place.