Your best accessory is a smile...
But your second best accessory is something vintage!
At risk of appearing to be a hoarder, here’s a peek at my ‘jewelry station’.
I’ve had so much fun over the years adding to my collection of colourful, mostly vintage, accessories. They’re so unique!
I love imagining who first wore each piece, what her life was like and what she did while she wore it. Was it in the 50’s, wearing heels in the kitchen making dinner? In the 60’s having friends over for a potluck, sitting around on those amazing velour couches? In the 70’s watching the hippies protest? 🤔 (haha, just kidding)
I used to draw the line at considering 80’s as vintage because I lived through it, and I’m not that old dammit!! But that era is starting to grow on me (it’s the toys and the candy, they get me feeling nostalgic ☺️) so who knows? I could rock a good shoulder pad and leg warmer. (said no one, ever 😆)
It pained me to keep everything stuffed in a drawer, so I decided to display it. And now, every time I walk into my room I’m greeted with a small wall of happiness! The light from my big south-facing window hits it just right, and puts a tiny bit of sparkle on it all.
It wasn’t difficult to do, just took a bit of time and vision. If you’re a, um, collector like me, there’s a good chance you have a lot of the supplies already. If not, it calls for a quick garage sale/thrift store/back alley scrounge to pick them up. Not your thing? All good, no judgement, you can go to a ‘new stuff’ store for supplies if you want instead 😊
The flowered background for the bracelet section is an old piece of wood with flowered Mac-Tac on it. I believe it was originally a drawer bottom – I rescued it from an older house that was being demolished (I tell the fascinating (teehee) story in my Cinnamon Bun Masterclass video, so that’s the short version of the story haha)
I hammered nails into it, spaced apart enough to accommodate the round shapes, and then organized by color. I found that it worked best for solid bracelets. Beaded bracelets sit down below in the little cabinet; the strings get stretched out if they sit on a nail for too long 🙁 I’m still working on a display solution for those guys.
Same idea for the necklaces; on nails, organized by color.
The wood that these are on were fence boards I found in the pasture when we bought our house. Isn’t the color awesome?!?!
I screwed them to the front of a small open-front shelf (which came from a garage sale)
The nails holding those up are a little bit fancy… they’re horse shoe nails. Some of them are actually nails that were half sticking out of the orange board in the pasture, so I just left them.
The cool thing about this setup is that because the shelf is open, I can still stash things behind the necklaces but they’re somewhat out of view.
What vintage jewelry collection would be complete without an assortment of clip-on earrings, right?! Yeah, I’ve actually worn them 🙂
This little carousel is one of my favorite repurposed pieces. Purchased from an antique shop, I’m pretty sure it’s for holding boxes of auto parts (like, spark plugs?) but the edges are just the right size for the earring backs to clip onto.
I arranged them by, you guessed it, color. There were quite a few that I wasn’t wearing often that I used for a crafty decorating project and they now live on a painting in my living room. But that’s another post…
Did you see the little stick tree in the first photo? It’s super handy for organizing rings. Hubs made that for me quite a few years ago (he’s the talent, I’m the hack when working on crafty building projects 🤭)
And of course there’s an ashtray in the collection (isn’t it crazy to think that they used to be everywhere and now they’re almost extinct?) that thick heavy orange glass number – which could quite easily double as a weapon- sitting on top. It holds random earrings or things I’m too lazy to put back right away 😋
Most exciting of all perhaps, is that I noticed for the first time that there’s a layer of orangey-pink paint under the brown of the shelf eeeeee! (👈 that’s a squeal of excitement right there) So guess what’s gettin’ a makeover?!? Woot woot. It won’t be for a little while, but I’ll let you know when it’s time!