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Repurposed Fireplace Screen Earring Display

by Brandi.
(Turlock, California)

When I received a last minute invitation to set up a vendor booth (only my second booth ever!) at a local car show / vendor booth fund raiser, my first instinct was to decline the event.

I would only have 3 days to create enough pieces to fill a 10 x 10 booth, as well as find some non-yardsale looking displays for it all!

But rather than decline, I borrowed a tent, ordered a quickie free vinyl banner (minus shipping) from vistaprint.com to ship via 2-day air, and began the search for displays (hopefully in somewhat of a matching color scheme or theme).

In between each piece of jewelry that I was hurriedly making, I would take a break to work on the rest of my booth.

(All while taking care of my 4-year-old, very sick son.)

The most difficult task seemed to be finding a way to display all of the many earring pairs (all dangles of course) I had and was making more of.

My first obstacle here was that I did not possibly have time to make display cards, hang the earrings on them, price them, and find a way to show them all without over-cluttering my space.

Luckily, 36 hours before the 7 a.m. set up of the booth, the genius light bulb popped on in the creative portion of my tired brain.

Right in plain sight in front of me, I practically walked into my next earring display!

I must have walked by this tattered, falling apart piece of scrap iron a million times.

It was our old black iron and gold “colored” brass metal, 3-section fireplace screen.

Some of the pieces that hold the brass to the iron were missing as were some of the doo-hickies that kept level, but the parts needed to make it fold into 3 sections were all working and the three panels were still perfect.

I managed to rummage up one single can that was almost full of satin black spray paint, and squeezed out enough to completely cover the entire piece so that it was (roughly) all one color.

Luckily the other jewelry display pieces I would be using were also all black.

After the paint dried, I folded the screen into a long pyramid so that one of the sides was the base, one side was the back, and the third side I would use to hang all of my earring pairs from.

I hung plain black cards with silver pricing hand written on them, right next to each pair of earrings, with a tiny piece of wire.

So not to be to over-cluttered, I would replace each pair sold with a new pair that was priced the same as the sold pair.

It worked rather well in a pinch, and I now plan to incorporate the display into all of my future booth setups.

I will also be using it now at all the home parties I do regularly.

Because the fireplace screen earring display has a flat, sturdy base, I can load it full of earrings and slide it right into my car as is.

Thanks to the diamond shape of the screen holes, the earrings stay in place quite nicely, even without the rubber earring backs!!

Brandi
BeadDesignsbyBrandi

Comments:

Inspiration strikes!
by: Rena

I’m so impressed with your efforts to get totally ready for a show, practically from scratch, in just 3 days.

And especially to do it all so inexpensively when you were that short on time!

Thanks for sharing your great idea to re-finish and repurpose your old fireplace screen – it made a perfect earring rack.

Fireplace Screens Displays
by: Chris Klein

I have used firplace screens for jewelry displays for several years now. I use them for bracelets especially and display the bracelets by color. I use the for my other jewelry items also. They work wonderful with Christmas ornament hooks.