Knots, bends, entangled strands – it had to end.

That’s what I thought when I took a good look at my necklaces a couple of weeks ago. I remembered that something like a jewelry / necklace stand / tree existed and searched the web to find some answers. All commercial ones looked kind of unstable, did not have much space for the jewelry, were too short / small / tall, or were not to my taste. I also ran across a Swiss artist’s (Reto Baumann) interpretation of a jewelry tree.

That’s when I decided to make my own. I was going home for Christmas where I knew I would have a workshop, my dad still had tons of wood to choose from, and I would have all the tools I needed. I had called ahead to ask if he had any suggestions for the material of the “branches” as they needed to be made of some metal that could be bend easily but not too easily.

When I was at home, my dad and I looked for a nice piece of wood. We eventually found a piece of locust that would work perfectly. My dad used a big electric saw to shape it nicely. Then we sanded it lightly to bring out the texture.

We had a good collection of rods from 2 mm to 7 mm thick in my dad’s workshop. I chose brass rods of 3 mm that are used for welding because they were flexible enough to be bent without problems, but sturdy enough to keep from changing their shape if something was draped over them. The length of the individual rods we decided on was 0.5 m with one longer one of 0.6 m and a shorter one of only 0.4 m. Altogether I had 10 rods to bend. I used tongs for the bending process while keeping the rod immobilized in a bench vise. I also used some steel wool to put a shine on the rods.

After I finished the bending, I drilled 10 holes into my wooden base and varnished it twice. Twice because the “hair” of the wood would stand up after the first coat of varnish. Thus, I had to apply some strokes with the steel wool and could varnish a second time. The diameter of the holes was the same as the rods which allows me to avoid having to glue the rods into the wooden base unless necessary. Currently, only one rod moves around a bit. The others are pretty tight. Furthermore, having the rods a bit mobile, I can change their position. I already realized that I should have drilled the holes a bit closer to the white rim (I could only drill within the brown center) to set them further apart. When I put the rods in the wood for the first time, I had to re-bend a couple of them a bit, but that was also to their advantage.

Here is my jewelry tree, my Xmas gift to myself:

Jewelry tree made out of locust wood and brass rods

And the tree in action:

My jewelry tree with most of my necklaces