Dorm Room Decorations: Displaying Your Earrings

A couple years ago my parents replaced all the windows in our house. I loved the aesthetic of the old, rotting window panes but my parents wanted to save money on our heating bill so the windows were removed. As a form of rebellion, I collected a couple of the old windows and stored them in the basement.

(If you couldn't tell, I was not a very rebellious child...)

Over the years, I have contemplated how to refurbish these windows. My senior year of high school, I created a piece of artwork out of one of them:

Artist: Thea Lange

Title: Through the Looking Glass

Medium: Glass-paned window, acrylic paint

Process: This piece was created out of the frustration and anger I was feeling.  The splatter and dark tone of the paint alludes to the impatience and depression that inspired the piece.  The window is meant to represent the viewer snooping in on me.  The only thing they see, however, is my emotion but not the history or cause of it. 

Inspirations:  Jackson Pollack was a huge inspiration for me, especially because of how he made his art about the process rather than the product.  His pieces were not meant to represent visual stories but emotional ones.  

(I might not have been rebellious but I was definitely angsty...) 

This year (almost exactly four years later), I discovered a way to repurpose the second window! I turned it into a cork board! I saw this idea at a flee market a couple months ago. A woman was selling window frames she had turned into bulletin boards for peoples' kitchens. But I took her idea a step further. I decided to use pushpins to turn my bulletin board into a jewelry display!

It was a really simple procedure that I completed in about three hours. To start, I purchased foam board and a roll of cork. I first cut pieces of foam board to fit into each of the squares. (Because the windows are old, the panes are not all the same size. There was a lot of measuring involved!) After I finished cutting all the squares from foam board, I had to cut the cork into squares. I hot glue-gunned each of the pieces of cork onto its corresponding piece of foam board. Then I fit each of the squares into its proper pane. If you are really careful with measuring, you don't have to glue the pieces into place - that way you can use the window for another project later!

This was a great, simple way to display my jewelry at school - and it looks so good I might even use it in my apartment next year!