Displaying running medals
I'm pretty proud of my various completion medals for races I've run. Most of them were acquired during the Austin Distance Challenge, when practically every race I finished was longer than I'd ever run before. The other two are from a half marathon I completed after failing to run it the previous year because of my illness, and the marathon I recently completed (my second). I've had the medals balled up in a wad on my desk for over a year now, because I couldn't figure out what to do with them but was unwilling to throw the mementos away.
Several weekends ago, I decided I was sick of having them an untidy pile. I actually put them in a trash can, then felt so sad that I pulled them back out and spent a couple of hours figuring out how to display them. I didn't want a shadow box, because as I get more medals I'm proud of, I'd like to easily add them to my display. And I didn't want to spend a ton of money on some sort of purchased display option.
So I created a variant of a jewelry display I saw at a craft show to display earrings. I went to the hardware store and got a sheet of decorative metal (no idea what it's typically used for, though I would guess some sort of radiator grill or something), spray-painted an old gold and silver frame a dark, shiny black, and paired the two together with some S hooks to get this:
I'm pretty happy with the result. It's easy to add or remove medals, looks reasonably crisp and modern, and was pretty inexpensive ($30 for the metal, $10 for the hooks, all other items on hand and I now have cool leftover metal).
In unrelated news, Jeff and I are finally getting our master shower fixed. We realized after we bought the house that it was leaking. We finally got a contractor to come out, bid, return calls after the bid, and start work. Yay! It does mean, however, that my morning is punctuated by the sound of demolition and the contractor muttering, "unacceptable!" to himself as he sees exactly what the previous owners did to the shower.
Several weekends ago, I decided I was sick of having them an untidy pile. I actually put them in a trash can, then felt so sad that I pulled them back out and spent a couple of hours figuring out how to display them. I didn't want a shadow box, because as I get more medals I'm proud of, I'd like to easily add them to my display. And I didn't want to spend a ton of money on some sort of purchased display option.
So I created a variant of a jewelry display I saw at a craft show to display earrings. I went to the hardware store and got a sheet of decorative metal (no idea what it's typically used for, though I would guess some sort of radiator grill or something), spray-painted an old gold and silver frame a dark, shiny black, and paired the two together with some S hooks to get this:
I'm pretty happy with the result. It's easy to add or remove medals, looks reasonably crisp and modern, and was pretty inexpensive ($30 for the metal, $10 for the hooks, all other items on hand and I now have cool leftover metal).
In unrelated news, Jeff and I are finally getting our master shower fixed. We realized after we bought the house that it was leaking. We finally got a contractor to come out, bid, return calls after the bid, and start work. Yay! It does mean, however, that my morning is punctuated by the sound of demolition and the contractor muttering, "unacceptable!" to himself as he sees exactly what the previous owners did to the shower.