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Its crafting time! The time for my old jewelry photography light box to retire has come. Lined with paper to reflect light back on the jewelry it did a pretty good job, but the paper was looking sad, the cardboard a mess, and I found another blog with a great idea for getting good results.

Seeing as how I've never read an instruction manual in my life I grabbed a knife and started cutting. Despite my skills with a pair of pliers, the second glue and paper become involved the whole thing gets messy.

I had a lot of fun making this, but it has that wonderfully homemade, my-god-is-it-supposed-to-look-like-that vibe. I had some old fabric left over from a project I never got around to, so I used craft glue to cover the open sides. The fabric is thin enough that light will pass through it easily, creating the perfect tent cover.

Here it is completed:

I added a curve of cardboard to the back to act as a white background for the base and back.

I have a really good lamp that I found at a hardware store for about $5 with a nicely diffuse light bulb, and on the left top I have a slave flash that fires along with the ring flash I have on the camera.

For my last box I had my husband make me a set of stands out of Lego to support a wire for earrings. That worked pretty well, but I wanted something more permanent since I mostly make earrings now.

Using craft wire, I attached a length of Beadalon and weighted it with some heavy beads. It's not pretty, but it works! The beads are heavy enough to keep the beading wire nicely taut so the earrings stay separated instead of drooping to the center like an old couch.

Never one to say no to a bit of Lego, I now have a much smaller, single stand with a plastic tube attached to the top. The tube is the perfect size to clip an ear cuff, making a quickly adjustable modification to the setup.

As delightfully home-brewed as it looks the results are fantastic. Here's the test shot I took using the box. No Photoshop, and lots of beautifully highlighted silver, with preserved depth and texture.