One of my granddaughter’s celebrated a recent birthday by getting her ears pierced. She can’t wait to collect an assortment of fun earrings to accessorize her outfits. The potential of a collection of earrings means she needs a place to store the ones NOT currently on her ears! This gave me an opportunity to be creative.

She lives in a place with not much room to have “pretty things” sitting around, so I decided to purchase a wooden framed hanging board for the earring holder. It will take up wall space instead. She loves all things unicorn and this little wooden unicorn jumped into my shopping cart as well.

I drew out the design I wanted on a piece of newsprint and my husband drilled little holes into the wooden board for me. I painted a background of purples and pinks in metallic shimmery paint. The hanger beads were tied onto the frame with string, so I took them off and rigged up a contraption to hold the beads while I painted them. I shaped a wire clothes hanger in such a way that the beads would be separated into the three colors I wanted to paint them. After stringing the beads on, I stuck the ends into a piece of styrofoam to hold the wire in place. I did have to use a toothpick inserted at an angle into the hole of each bead to help hold the bead still while I painted it. It worked!

I painted a line through my swirled background from which to “hang” the earrings. Each set of holes was painted with hearts or stars. Though it doesn’t show well in the pictures, everything was painted over with shimmery glitter paint. My granddaughter loves sparkles! The wooden unicorn was painted in similar colors with lots of sparkles. I tied variegated colored crochet thread into bows and glued them in place to “hang” the stars and heart shapes from. I also put a dab of Fray-Check onto each thread end to keep the thread from fraying.

Rather than permanently gluing the unicorn to the board, I put magnets on the back side of the unicorn and on the board. This way she can take the unicorn off to play with.

And here is what the finished unicorn earring holder looks like: