organize

I first met Jocelyn while looking for a seat to have lunch in the cafeteria at BlogU. Feeling eerily like the first day of middle school, I spotted Jocelyn with a warm welcoming smile. We hit it off quickly chatting about the classes we’d taken and bonding over being moms of toddlers. I’ve since stayed in contact with Jocelyn through our tribe and have always loved her quick wit and funny spin on everyday life. I knew between my trip to ATL last week and our trip next week I’d be struggling to get posts up. I wanted to showcase a few of my favorite bloggers and was excited when Jocelyn jumped at the chance to help! So without further ado, meet Jocelyn.

What do you do when you own approximately a trillion pairs of earrings? …When they’re getting all tangled, mixed up, and separated from their twins in your otherwise trusty jewelry box?

This of course is a very tragic problem and one for which there are only two solutions. 1) You can go out and get more piercings in your ears (or elsewhere on your body) in order to wear all of them simultaneously or 2) You can build your very own “Earrings on a Wire” display case, as pictured above. I recommend the latter, especially if most of your earrings are of the “dangly” variety, because wearing more than one set of danglies not only looks strange, but could turn you into a human wind chime as they bounce off of one other.

I got my ears pierced when I was 13. My mother wouldn’t allow me to do so earlier despite all my whiny begging. In order to ward me off of the concept, she assured me that the process would be VERY painful. She said, and I quote, “You know that they’ll have to hang buckets from each of your ears to catch all the blood, right?” This sounds evil, but my mother was always a jokester, so I knew she was joking. Kind of.

Once I got my ears pierced, on my 13th birthday (no buckets needed), I felt that I had officially become a woman. And I started amassing The Collection: most earrings weren’t all that expensive, didn’t take up that much room, and I derived an inordinate amount of joy from coordinating them with each day’s outfit. I still have most of them, and I am proud to say that my earrings from high school still fit. (Hey, just humor me – I can’t say that about much else from that time…)

In recent years, my husband Rob has turned out to be an excellent curator of The Collection, adding stylish silver danglies on my birthdays and on Christmas from places like The Clay Pot in Brooklyn and Fireworks Gallery in Seattle and The Sundance Catalogue.

Okay, so I have too many earrings. I can admit it. I really needed a way to keep them all straight. When we were living in the South Bronx, we rigged up a wire across a window sill for them to perch on, which worked out very well:

Note that, to avoid adding any more furniture to our bedroom, I further maximized the windowsill by storing the rest of my jewels in those skinny olive dishes (great for rings!)

In our new house, the window idea wasn’t going to work, so I picked up a wooden tray from Target (I think it was about $12) and a little mirror from there as well. Rob strung some wires horizontally and connected them to the inside edges of the tray with short screws. And voila! Now I can see my earrings, even if I can’t begin to wear them all. (The other good news is that, up on the wall like that, they are well out of reach for our 2.5 year old…)

If you are experiencing a similar embarrassment of riches, I recommend that you try this easy DIY project. It would work well with round trays, different colored-trays, and with wooden picture frames, as well.

–Genius earring holder Jocelyn! This is one of the best earring holders I’ve seen and it’s super doable in one afternoon! You could even switch it up by using a colored tray or using wrapping paper as the background. Personally, I like the clean white tray you used because it showcases your earrings so nicely!