From 2014-2016 I chronicled my crafty endeavors on the site Adventures-in-Making. I’ve selected a few of those DIY’s, Recipes, and other posts to share on the site.

When you’re setting up a shop, or a booth for the first time, it seems like everyone has advice. What they don’t tell you about  is the agony, exhilaration, and frustration that is display.

I think that I could spend every waking hour working on display pieces in my store, and never be done– and yet, I love putting together something unique that shows off the artist’s work (and my cleverness.)

I’d been using this stripped-down silverware box for display, but didn’t feel like if was as useful as it should be. I starting thinking about buying a piece of cork board to hang jewelry pieces from the back- then realized I was ignoring a free material right at my fingertips, those wine corks someone had been hoarding. (Just so you don’t worry about me being crushed in a pile of old newspaper and wine corks, I wasn’t the one saving them; and this project used up almost all of them.)

I decided to line the back of the box in little slivers of cork. So I laid each cork out on a cutting board, and

cut it into four pieces. (It’s not an exact science. I wanted the cork backing to be a little uneven, like old masonry.)

After I had cut a whole bunch of corks, I got ready to glue.

I used Aleene’s Tacky Glue to glue each cork sliver down, packing them in tightly to fill the space.

At the edges, I cut the cork slivers in half to fill in where needed.

Once I filled in the whole back, I let it dry overnight, before filling the bottom portion with dry rice. (Rice is a display staple, not just a food!)

I pressed straight pins into the cork to hang jewelry. (I’ve found that the less fidgety a display is, the more comfortable people are using it. The pins are easier to pull earrings off of than clips.)

One more display case down.

(The jewelry pieces seen here are from Christine Stoll jewelry, available at the So There store, and her shop ChristineStoll.com.)