DIY Barbie Doll Jewelry Holder

Before we had a daughter, Tom and I didn’t really believe in the whole nature vs. nurture thing.  I mean, we had a son, Zack, who enjoyed things like dump trucks and toy tools, but we just assumed that it was because we were DIYers who lived in a neighborhood that was under construction.  But when Emma arrived, she threw us for a loop.

As soon as she started walking, Emma would find just about anything to turn it into a purse to carry on her shoulder – a Target shopping bag being among her favorites.  It quickly progressed into shoes, tiaras, dresses and jewelry.  None of it was anything we encouraged in her, so the fact that she just seemingly knew about accessorizing blew our minds.

Now that Emma is a few years older, I needed to find a place to put all of her little necklaces.  My original plan was to paint a pegboard with different color stripes to match her bedroom.  But then, things went off the rail a bit.

I honestly can’t say how the Barbie idea came into my head.  Like so many of the weird things that I come up with, I just woke up one morning and it was there.  I couldn’t find any Barbies at my local thrift store, so I put out a call on a local moms buy/sell/trade board on Facebook to see if anyone had some they wanted to part with.  Almost immediately, someone told me that I could have 10 of theirs for $10.  Score!

The Barbies came to me naked, so I needed to dress them.  I bought this no sew 6-in-1 Barbie dress tutorial on Etsy, and Emma picked out some gold lame fabric for them to wear.  I made them little dresses and styled their hair.

Then, I just tied them onto the pegboard by wrapping fishing line around their waists and through the pegboard holes a few times and tying it on the back of the board.  They are surprisingly stable!

The Barbies’ arms easily hold the weight of a necklace or two.  A few of them weren’t as tight as the others, so I put a little dot of super glue on them.  That worked perfectly.

I ended up hanging the board over the chair rail molding on Emma’s wall, so I had to build a little frame of 1×2’s to extend it out of the wall a little bit.  I left a hole where it hits the molding, and it fits in that space really well.

The whole thing is screwed into the studs behind her wall, so there’s no chance that it’s going to fall down.

Emma loves her new little jewelry holder, as crazy as it may seem.  And no…the Barbies haven’t come to life yet.  I think it was my friend Heather who called them Golden Globe Barbie zombies.  Ha!

What do you think?  Crazy creative or crazy freaky?  Wait, don’t answer that.