Our Hopeful Home: How to Make An Earring Card Holder (Halloween Earrings)

Hello, friends! I hope you're all having a great weekend. Here in the midwest we've been trying to adjust to shorter days and only somewhat cooler temperatures. Truth be told it's still a bit warm for fall. Hopefully there's an end in sight for that!

Now on to my latest project.

For those of you who are loyal followers, you know all about my recent first-time-ever craft show, The Festival of the Vine, in historic downtown Geneva, IL. It was a lot of hard work, but a lot of fun, too.

And for the first time I had to create my own earring card holders. I'm generally not big on making earrings, but for Halloween I just had to make these.

The skulls were part of a really cool keychain I picked up at a church barn sale a few years ago. There were a ton of skulls all strung together to make up the key chain. So of course I took them apart and used them to make Halloween earrings!

My dilemma was how to display them at the show. I lucked out finding these blank gift tags, and went from there.

First I stamped them with a fleur-de-lis. Then I used an awl to poke teeny tiny holes into the card where I thought the ear wires should go.

Those awls are r-e-a-l-l-y sharp and pointy, so be careful! Hhmmm.....I wonder if awling is a word?

I just estimated where I wanted the holes to go and then marked the card with two light pencil marks to guide me.

Here they are on a different-shaped card stock card that I really liked as well. And they're hanging from my jewelry tree, a Target item I picked up at Goodwill for $2.99. It ended up working out really well as a display for the show.

I sold a few pairs at the show, but I've still got a bunch left that would be perfect for Halloween. My Etsy shop is on hiatus while I work to revamp my inventory (most of it is going to a local shop next week) but if you're interested, just leave a comment or email me. They're really reasonably priced and so fun!!!

As for the cards themselves, I think I got them on sale at Michael's a while back. They were fairly inexpensive and it worked for me since I only had around 15 pairs of earrings to worry about hanging. If you have more inventory than that and don't want to spend too much money you can always make the cards yourself from inexpensive card stock.

Another option for hanging your earrings is using vintage photographs instead of card stock. You can see how I used them here on the bottom of this display.

I'll admit I stole the idea from Anthropologie. The first time I saw it done was in one of their stores and I thought it was genius! I mean, you see these old photos for sale by the shoebox-ful at yard sales and flea markets.....how sad that they've become separated from the family they belong to! So why not repurpose them into something meaningful again? I picked mine up at an antique mall in Michigan. But you really should look at yard sales and estate sales for the cheapest prices.

They were quite the conversation piece at my show. Many women were drawn into my booth by them, reminded of their own old family photos. To make them, you just do the same thing as you do with the card stock cards. Figure out where you want the ear wires to go and AWL them!