Turquoise Feather Earrings, more table tweaking & a how-to on covering display boards...

What a week this has been, and these next two weeks will be just as crazy. More and more typing pouring in, and now more orders for cake jewellery. Yay! Now to figure out how to stretch 24 hours in blistering heat and humidity to do all that is required, plus I will be without a computer for four days from the 16th to the 19th while it's being upgraded. Means that while I will be able to check my email at the library, pretty much nothing else will get done, certainly not work. I guess that's good. More time to clean up here and make more jewellery... or get a lot of reading done out on the deck amid my flowers. At least in the mornings that's what I plan to be doing. Washed down with copious cappuccinos, of course.

Yesterday at the market I put this pair of earrings together:

Turquoise blue feathers, Southwestern style pewter cross bead and sterling earwires. $18, shipping extra, please email me for details. I will be making other things with these crosses, so stay tuned.

I'd run out of little metal thingies for the feathers, so I had to wrap a loop onto them. Tedious and in the heat and humidity all the tiny featherettes were sticking to my fingers. If "featherettes" is not a word, it should be. But better to my fingers than up my nose, which usually happens when I'm in feather earring-making mode.

I also got Chris the Honey Guy to cut me some taller boards for my table, the same width that I have been using, plus two wider boards. The narrower boards will fit into my carry bag, and the wider ones will fit into the bin with the beads and necklaces on curtain rods, so everything is kept together. Lynn, my merchandising display pal from Imogene's, moved everything over from the smaller boards and the whole display looks a whole lot cleaner, more spacious and organised. The small boards are great to provide to stores to display things.

I also remembered to take pictures of the -- what? -- hangers, display thingies? -- brackets! Thank you -- to hang all my miscellaneous necklaces on so people can actually riffle through them and see them more easily. Getting the necklaces off the brackets easily is still the problem. But maybe there are way too many necklaces on them... yes, that's got to be resolved.

Bracket display:

New display boards in action:

Step-by-step covering the boards with quilt batting, velour (watch the nap direction, you want it running vertically, not horizontally) and, as always, staple-guns are your friend. Yes, this was done on my bed. Once I boot Max off, it is the only flat surface in my house that isn't covered a foot deep with jewellery stuff or books or papers (or Max).

Cut stretch velour and quilt batting maybe an inch or so larger than the board you're covering. For sure, yoiu want the batting to wrap around the edges of the plywood to protect the velour from snags:

 

Lay them out velour good side down, then the batting, then the good side of the board face down:

Firmly hold down the middle of the board, and lightly stretch the top edge of the velour down and staple gun it. Make sure the staple is parallel to the top edge, then do the same for the bottom.

Do the sides:

Do the corners. Make sure the batting covers the corner of the board:

Gently stretch the velour on an angle and staple-gun this time at a 45 degree angle to the edges of the board so the velour doesn't eventually tear. Do this at all four corners:

Bring the folded edge across and staplegun, as shown:

Do the other folded edge, as shown:

Do this for all four corners. Then go along the edges and pull in and staple on each side of the original centre staples thereby ending up with three staples positioned evenly along each side of the board.

Thanks for looking!