A Budget Way to Make a Jewellery Display Stand

Good afternoon folks! It's been a while since I've had the time to sit down and write anything on here, but I had to share this clever wee shortcut with you. As you'll see from my previous posts I make my own jewellery, and I recently attended a craft show to try and sell some of my work. I noticed a lot of people have these fancy wooden tiered display stands, but since I only intend to do a few fairs a year I didn't want to fork out loads of money for a stand! I came up with a quick and easy solution to the problem using the ever-so-useful crafting material that is chipboard and some other bits and piece that are already in an everyday crafter's stash. Here's what you'll need to make this...

1. Some A4 pieces of chipboard (at least 4 but I'd have extra in case something goes wrong!): it doesn't have to be that heavy weight but it should be robust enough to stand up when slotted together with the other pieces of the stand
2. White A4 card (8+ depending on how many sheets of chipboard you require): I used a really nice white textured cardstock from Paper Mill that's quite strong and gives a nice finish
3. 2 plastic/wooden 30cm dowels: the best for me were actually wedding cake dowels (6mm x 30cm dowels from Amazon.co.uk) because they went well with the patterned paper that I used on the panels
4. Patterned paper, card and embellishments for decorating!

You could technically do this with whatever size of card you want, scaling it up or down as you need, but I thought that A4 worked best as it was just big enough for long earrings to hang in but small enough to not swamp your whole display table.

I first covered all my chipboard on both sides with the white A4 card to give it a smooth finish. To make the back panel of the display I cut two 10.5cm slits at each end of the chipboard, about 1cm in from the side using a craft knife. You can cut from top to bottom or bottom to top but REMEMBER: whatever direction you do on the back you have to do the opposite on the sides so that the panels slot together nicely (see below).

To make the side panels, I made my 'stairs' 9.8cm wide by 7cm high (about 3 equal sized stairs on a sheet of A4). Mark the tops of the stairs at 7cm and 14cm (for the middle stair). You can make the stairs whatever size you want, or add more if you need more space! After I had cut out the 'stairs' I made similar slits as to on the back panel (1cm in and 10.5cm long) on the tall stair and 1cm in/3.5cm long slits on the low stair. Another thing you need to do on these panels is make notches for your dowels to sit in to form your earring hanging bars. The size you make these will depend on the size of your bars, but I made 1cm x 1cm indentations for my 6mm dowels to sit in. For the lowest 'stair', I decided to put in a shelf that I could rest smaller earrings or necklaces on, so I cut a 7.8cm x 1cm slot in these bottom 'stairs'. I then cut pieces of A4 chipboard and card to 7.8cm wide to make the shelf to slot in.

The front panel is made in a similar way to the back panel: just cut yourself pieces of chipboard and card to the same height as your lowest 'stair' (7cm in my case) and cut slits in both ends (1cm in/3.5cm long for mine).

Next comes the fun part: decorating! For this I used my favorite crafting card (Kraft card) and some 12 x 12cm floral patterned paper from my stash. I also added the logo that I designed for mine and my mum's craft business, a good way to get some advertising in without having signs dotted about your display table.

Make sure to decorate both sides of your side panels: I found that the stand looks a little bare if you only decorate the back on the inside surface! I'd also go for reasonably light colours of paper as well since the last thing you want is your stand overpowering the jewellery it's meant to be displaying! Once you have decorated all your panels, you should be able to assemble your completed stand into something that looks like this...

TA-DA! So there you have it, a cheaper way to make a display for your jewellery with bits and pieces that you have lying around your craft room anyway. The other handy thing about it is it's completely collapsible, so you don't have to waste precious space in your crafting room. Feel free to let me know if you try this out and whether it works for you, and any improvements you make to it to suit your needs! Happy crafting everyone!

Emma x