jewelry storage Archives

The jewelry safe of my dreams.

December 1, 2017

It’s no surprise that jewelry enthusiasts love jewelry…but you know what else we love? We love doing right by our jewelry. We love keeping our jewelry safe and organized in a way that does it justice: we fantasize about the perfect Barbie dream house of a jewelry box for our precious treasures to live in.

My personal jewelry storage situation fluctuates, but my ultimate goal is clear: I dream of a custom jewelry safe.

Can you imagine the luxury, the convenience? A top quality safe, built to perfectly house your very own collection? I know I’m not the only one drooling.

These beauties are from Brown Safe, and they’re built specifically for jewelry: velvet or Ultrasuede lined interiors; custom interior LED lighting; fingerprint reading entry keys; interior mirrors; even automatic watch winders for the timepiece collector. You can choose from a variety of hardwoods and have the outside painted to match the rest of your boudoir.

I hear angels sing when I look at this.

You can choose from a number of pre-configured options or live my dream and create your own perfect jewelry safe based on your collection.

I don’t know if you know this about me…but I LOVE organizing things. And the more I love something, the more I love organizing it. Soooooo talking about designing a custom jewelry safe for my own beloved collection is actually so exciting to me that I can barely stand it! Consider me verklempt.

Here’s a tiny snapshot of one page of the options you can choose for the drawers in your custom jewelry safe! Look at all the options!!

It’s important to mention that these jewelry safes aren’t just pretty. Brown Safe is an expert security manufacturer with years of experience making safes and vaults for not only private homes, but also entities like movie studios and the US military. These safes actually keep your jewelry safe.

I can’t be the only one who thinks this is the coolest thing ever. Who’s with me? Are you already planning your custom jewelry safe in your head while you read? Tell me about it in the comments!

This sponsored post is brought to you by Brown Safe. All images c/o Brown Safe.

Brown Safe is giving me new #jewelryboxgoals.

February 24, 2017

I don’t mean to shock you…but I have a lot of jewelry. It isn’t all especially valuable, but it’s all important to me and it’s a constant struggle to figure out how the heck to store it.

Thanks to Brown Safe, I now know exactly what my jewelry storage dreams look like. Are you ready for this magnificence?

Does anyone else hear angels singing when they look at that photo, or just me?

Brown Safe prides themselves in changing the way that people think about safes by providing custom options that are beautiful, luxurious, and – most of all – secure. In the words of Brown Safe’s VP, Lynel Berryhill:

Our industry, like many others, is full of low quality knock-off safes that may look nice but do little more than organized your belongings for the burglar.”

This one gives you a better look at what the custom lighting can achieve. It’s so wonderful I can barely look at it.

I currently store my jewelry in a combination of places, including a converted cigar box, an empty wine bottle (I put large cuffs over the top), a bracelet display stand, some ring dishes, a jewelry armoire, and a about 10 packages worth of Command hooks stuck to my wall.

A family owned company, Brown Safe has been producing high-quality safes in the US for nearly 40 years. In addition to the beautiful units for private homes, Brown Safe provides safes for an number of high-profile clients, from movie sets and TV shows to providing safes and vaults for the US military, embassies, and even covert government needs.

This is my dream: individual compartments in a beautiful structure that provides my pretties with a home that’s both secure and worthy of their beauty.

Brown Safe are highly customizable, offering a wide array of fabric types, alarm integration, lighting, watch storage, and drawer organization options…so I really could make sure there was a place for every piece, AND have the inside and outside of my dream safe match the decor in my boudoir. (This daydream is becoming rapidly more elaborate.)

How to pack jewelry for a move.

September 4, 2015

As I write this post, I’m sitting and looking at my jewelry four days before movers are to due to arrive. Nothing is packed.

My collection is rather large. Some pieces are valuable, but the vast majority is valuable only for sentimental reasons. Presents from my mom, mementos of beach vacations, that kind of thing. I would like to keep all of it safe, unbroken, and untangled.

Googling “how to pack jewelry for a move” returns results suitable for only small collections (“buy a jewelry roll!”) or serious optimists (“stick it to cardboard with press-and-seal clingwrap!”). No and no. I agree on only one point, which is do not entrust your jewelry to anyone but yourself.

My jewelry storage is rather display oriented – this makes it easy for me to pick out pieces when I’m getting dressed in the morning, but it also means I can’t just close my jewelry box and stick it in a bag.

Packing this much jewelry will require either a lot of time or a lot of money (if you decide to simply buy travel cases). I choose time.

THE MISSION: Pack jewelry for a move from old apartment to new apartment without wasting money I could otherwise spend on more jewelry or damaging/losing any of said already-owned jewelry.

THE GOALS:

Keep necklaces from tangling.
Keep earrings pairs together.
Prevent any pieces from bending, chipping, breaking, or otherwise suffering damage.
Don’t lose anything.
Retain sanity.

THE TOOLS:

Plastic drinking straws.
Jewelry boxes and pouches saved from years of collecting.
Paper towels.
Some smallish cardboard boxes (shoeboxes or similar).
Yarn.
Scissors.

Thanks to Pinterest, I had the idea of stringing my necklace chains through plastic straws to keep them from tangling. Because untangling necklace chains is the bane of my existence, and I will go to great lengths to avoid it.

This only works for certain necklaces – mostly chains with pendants. If something doesn’t want to go through the straw, don’t force it.

Once all of the necklaces that would go in straws were in straws, I rolled them up in paper towels. I made sure to spread the necklace/straws out so that each one would be fpully insulated from its neighbors in paper towel. I then tied each paper towel bundle gently but firmly with string, and placed the bundles carefully in a waiting cardboard box.

NOTE: I have now learned a better way to pack necklaces!! Read all about it here.

If you wanted to make this more eco-friendly, you could use dish towels or something that you’ll use again. My dish towels were already in use padding my packed dishes.

For beaded necklaces, necklaces that are less articulated, particularly fragile necklaces, or particularly sentimental necklaces, I didn’t want to use the straw-and-paper-towel method. The ones that didn’t need as much protection went in individual pouches which I placed on top of the paper towel bundles in that box. When the box was full, I started putting the pouches into a cosmetics case to keep them together and stable.

The more fragile pieces went in individual little boxes, carefully padded with cotton or wadded up paper towels. I ended with a whole second shoebox full of little boxes.

As for bracelets: I tucked a couple of cuffs into the side of the box of bundled necklaces and put the rest into boxes and pouches.

Finally, all that was left was earrings.

I had good intentions: I was going to poke them though pieces of paper, put them in tiny boxes…MacGyver something using materials I already had. But after spending several hours stringing my necklaces through straws and rolling them up in little paper towel bundles, I caved and bought something to make earring packing easier.

These sectioned plastic storage boxes are meant for beads, but they were perfect for temporary storage of a large number of earrings. I put 1-3 pairs in each little nook, depending on the size and delicacy of the earrings. I packed my most valuable earrings separately, since the little sections are just hard plastic and I didn’t want to risk my opals and pearls bouncing around.

Once everything was packed away, I sealed up the individual boxes and then packed them into some plastic crates I had, layering the packed jewelry with scarves and sweatshirts. I tucked in a couple of smaller jewelry boxes, my tiaras, my bracelet bar, and my earring display too.

My most fragile and precious jewelry – those pieces I didn’t trust in a box or couldn’t bear to have out of my sight – went into my trusty travel jewelry cases. These pieces stayed on my person the entire move: in my purse, within my view.

After talking to a wise friend, I’ve realized that using plastic jewelry bags and carefully threading the chain of each necklace so that it fed out of the top would have been a good way to pack the necklaces; possibly even a better way.

All in all, I’m happy with the way I came up with to pack jewelry for a move. It wasn’t the quickest, but it got the job done and kept my pretties safe. Now, to optimize my jewelry storage for my new space! But that’s a project for another day.

Do you have tips and tricks for the best ways to pack jewelry for a move? I’d love to hear your ideas.

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