Avenue Handmade

I’ve been pondering ways to best display my necklaces (which make up the largest chunk of my inventory by far) at craft fairs for several months now. I didn’t want any of the commercially available options, either–acrylic or velvet busts or risers. And as much as I like trees and tree-shaped things, many of my pieces just don’t look as dynamic when they’re simply dangling from a stem. Being this picky has left me pretty stumped, and frustrated at the increasingly cluttered look of my table, but I think I’ve finally found a few solutions.

1) I bought a 10′ x 10′ tent. Been putting it off for over a year, making do by sharing with one of my local crafting buds when possible, shying from the seemingly large investment…. But when you do outdoor fairs in Florida between March and October, not having a tent is quite a health hazard. My lovely tent (bonus: it’s tan, not blue or white!) will not only prevent heatstroke and sun poisoning but will also allow me to have more than one table (no, your eyes don’t deceive you–there’s only one in the pic ’cause I forgot to bring my 2nd table yesterday), thus helping alleviate the clutter problem.

2) I can now have one whole table dedicated to my necklaces, and thanks to my new corkboard necklace displays, they won’t all have to lie flat and jumbled on the surface of the table, but can be draped on cork in all their glory. Yay!

Since I was so pleased with how simple and easy my eventual display solution turned out, I thought I’d share the steps here. It’s not reinventing the wheel or anything, but it’s something that can be easily personalized and requires little investment of money or time.

I started with some MDF and a length of half-inch dowel (bought at Home Depot for about $5 total). I cut the MDF to 14″ x 24″, drilled half-inch holes about half an inch from one edge, and cut the dowel into four 5″ lengths. I also purchased a pack of four 12″-square cork tiles at Target (also about $5).

Next step was spray-painting the boards and dowels. Pretty self-explanatory. I chose to only paint one side for the time being, ’cause it was super-sunny and the paint was staying kinda sticky and I was impatient.

Since the cork was 12″ x 12″, and my boards were 24″ long (cut from a 48″ piece), I decided to cut 2″ off of two of the cork tiles so that I could leave a 1″ border around the cork when I attached it to the MDF. I just used craft glue (that impatient thing again–didn’t wanna wait for the glue gun to heat up), but hot glue would probably work equally well.

Then it was just a matter of lining up the cork tiles on the MDF, which I just eyeballed, and then waiting for the glue to dry (if I did this again, I’d probably use hot glue, because while the craft glue took its sweet time drying, the edges of the cork wanted to curl up a bit and I had to weight them down). All told, it took about an hour (including waiting for the paint to dry) to assemble both boards, plus glue-drying time. I’m really happy with the way this project turned out, and I think it will really enhance my craft fair display. The great thing about using the dowels for “legs” is that I can adjust the slant of the board with them–I simply pull them toward the front or back, depending on whether I want it to lean back or stand straight. The boards had their first road test yesterday, and never toppled once, despite wind that was wreaking havoc with other vendors’ display. Yay!