Today's post is a little different to recent posts in that I don't have a free tutorial for you but I really wanted to share with you this fabulous jewellery display. No doubt you've seen plenty of these around on the internet but this one was made especially for me by my father and he's done such a fabulous job on it - I couldn't be happier with how it turned out. My brief was that it needed to have mesh for hanging earrings, a rail for bracelets and hooks to hang necklaces from (I still need to screw those in along the bottom of the frame). The only other thing I specified was that it be black and white. You can clearly see the white frame. And that lovely white scallop in the background is actually curtain lace placed against black cardstock, so he fulfilled the brief perfectly. But what I love about the overall look of the display is how the white-on-black has become a shade of grey - it's the perfect foil to show off my jewellery without taking anything awa......

There's nothing more annoying than running out of  head pins or eye pins in the middle of a project. Sometimes I buy them in bulk to avoid that happening and whilst it can save a bundle of money, it can bring with it the extra effort of having to straighten them if they are mangled inside the package. And you can't always tell that from the outside of the pack. It's not until you open it that you might find they look more like the photo below. So my job today is to straighten out the kinks on the mangled ones hidden amongst them. Sometimes you can just run the pin through nylon jaw pliers but for ones with kinks like these or if your pins are made of a heavier gauge, you need to get rid of the kinks first. My method is to place the bent part into the jaws of my flat nose pliers and press down firmly. You can see how it has flattened that kink quite well. Once you've removed the major kinks, then you can run the pin through the nylon jaw pliers to straighten it out compl......