A Rainy Day Project

Happy MLK Day!!  How have you all been spending your holiday weekend?  I, for one, decided to take on a little project that I had been thinking about for the past couple of weeks - and have since been giddily sharing the results with everyone I know out of sheer delight that it came out exactly the way I imagined it (don't you love it when that happens?).

I'll be honest - I am not much of a DIY connoisseur when it comes to projects around our apartment.  We are renting and there is only so much that we can do that we won't have to undo within the next couple of months when I finish school and we move.

However, it was rainy and gross in Atlanta on Saturday and - since I really didn't feel like admitting to myself that school is back in session by spending the day reading - Bruce and I ventured out to our local Goodwill to tend to a DIY itch that had been building in me to find a new way to store my ever-growing earring collection.

We came home with these.  Two big wooden frames for $10.50 total - you really cannot beat that!!

We ripped out the backing and took the paintings out.

Then we sanded the frames down and wiped them off with a warm, wet towel in preparation for painting.

We shopped at our local Ace Hardware and used their color selection - the color we chose was called Goldrush.  Initially we had planned to go with a brown or black, but thought at the last minute that we wanted something a little bit more bold that would stand out on the walls.  I am so glad we did that - I love how unique it makes the frames look.

We let the paint dry and flipped the frames over to give a quick coat to the back before going on.  Because of the shape of the frames (and the fact that they were going to be three-dimensional off of the wall) we wanted there to be some consistency if you looked at them from a side angle (I am assuming if you used more of a flat frame you wouldn't need to do this).

I also used a small brush to make sure the crevices in the wood looked consistent with everything else.

Someone looked less than impressed with the progress we were making.

We used black window screen to "frame" this project - this is what the earrings get hooked onto.  Bruce used one of the original paintings from the frames to measure how much screen we would need.  He cut it out and we attached it to the inner-most part of the frame using a hot glue gun and then securing them with staples.  (If you try this, make sure to work through this step slowly - it's important to pull the screen as tightly as possible for some of the heavier earrings you may hang.)

Then we stapled black material on the outside of the frame - this served no functional purpose, rather it just created a black background so when the frame was hung you couldn't see through to the wall.

Rather than hanging them both separately, Bruce decided to screw hooks into the bottom of one frame and the top of another and string them together using rope.  This way, if I need to get to the back of the frame (for some of my earrings that have bullet clutches as backing) I can using the bottom frame.

Voila!!

What do you think?