Carolina Gonzalez of NeoVamp Jewelry, who always has wonderfully unique solutions for displaying jewelry, shares her creative ear climber / ear cuff display. She says:

"I don't have pierced ears and I don't like clip earrings -they fall if the clips are soft and they hurt my ears if they are hard.

Through the years I've had a few ear climbers but they're not easy to find here! [Carolina lives on the Canary Islands.]

They seem to have run out of fashion and now I only find them on gothic jewelry online shops and the like; so, I decided to make some.

I love unusual and ethnic jewelry and, being into the tattoo world, you get to see a lot of it.

When you make about 20 pairs of earrings a week, it's wonderful to have a new shape to play with!

When I had done four or five sketching prototypes and was happy with the result (that includes wearing the piece along one day to see if it is sturdy enough), I started thinking about putting some on my online shop… and then I realized I had no idea how I was going to make good pics of them.

When I placed them on my light box, they looked like everything - except ear climbers.

Taking pics of them on my own ear was definitely not a choice! There is nothing wrong with my ear (ha ha) but it would really take too much time and tries.

Again, tattoo art saved the day.

I remembered that on my tattoo supplies catalogues there were piercing anatomic displays.

In case you didn't know, piercings may have many different shapes and lengths depending on the part of the body where they are going to be placed so silicone piercing displays are just that, body parts.

Lips, eyebrows, noses, etc. And of course, ears.

I looked for the catalogues and hand sculpted a real life size ear of air-dry clay.

After about 25 minutes of drying I inserted a bamboo stick (mini-note for beginner sculptors: let the clay dry a little before making any holes to the piece; they will be more even).

After it dried I sanded it and adjusted any small cracks (very superficial cracks are very common in air-dry clay pieces as it really shrink when they dry) and then painted it with acrylics and varnished it.

As you can see in the pics, I also added a hole in the lobe to show matching earrings if there were any.

My first idea was to leave it like that to be able to punch the bamboo stick on a vase filled with sand or something like that.

But then I remembered I had this gorgeous lamp stand I had painted and I thought it would be perfect for the style of my whole display, which is very gypsy and colourful.

I just glued the bamboo stick - et voilà! An ear climber display!"

Carolina, thank you so much for sharing another of your wonderful jewelry display ideas!

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