Like many others, I've been using ice cube trays to store my earrings.  It's a great solution--each ice slot is the perfect size for one pair of earrings, and they stay sorted nicely, so I'm not constantly digging through piles and piles of earrings to find a matching pair.

However, for me, the ice cube tray system isn't ideal.  I have a lot of earrings, since I like to make jewelry, and the trays actually take up a lot of space.  Even though they fit perfectly (two deep and four across) in the top drawer of my nightstand, look at all that wasted space!

Plus, as any apartment-dweller will understand, knowing that I'm using an entire drawer for something as frivolous as earrings will keep me up at night.  That space could be put to such better use.

I thought for so long about so many possibilities.

• I could suck it up and buy some stackable jewelry trays for 10-20 bucks a pop... but with so many earrings, that would get really pricey really quick.

• I thought about making custom divided trays out of cardboard, but the engineering process exhausted me to think about.

• I thought about trying to find smaller, shallower ice cube trays.  I didn't think it would really solve the issue.

Then, the other day, I had an epiphany.

I had some candles lit, and one burned out.  I picked up the empty plastic tea light cup, and I marveled at its quality.  We've all burned the cheap tin tea lights that you can get in a pack of 100 for five bucks.  But these are the really nice ones that come in sturdy plastic cups.  I don't buy them often (wait for sales!), and when I do, I'm very stingy about burning them.  I have maybe four or five dozen packed away in my spare bedroom.

The sheer quantity of tea lights in my possession is even more of a reason to stop and wonder.  Can I use the empty cups for anything?

I know you know where this is going, but I wasn't thinking about earrings at the moment, so it didn't occur to me.

So I threw it away.

Yes, I had my epiphany about ten seconds later, and yes, I retrieved the tea light cup out of the trash.  Don't judge me.  Obviously these would be perfect for earrings.

I thought about the logistics.  I couldn't just put them in my drawer--there needed to be some way to stack them.  There also needed to be a way to keep them in place, so they won't roll around when I close the drawer and won't move out of place when I reach inside to take a pair of earrings out.

I went and got one of my boxes of tea lights to brainstorm some ideas.  Duh!  The box was the perfect size to hold twelve tea light cups--because that's what it was made for!  If I cut one of the sides off, I could use it as a tray.  I could cover it with scrapbook paper to make it pretty.  And I could glue the cups in place so they wouldn't move!

Needless to say, there have been a lot of burning candles in my apartment over the last few days.  But the payoff was soon worth it, and I had a prototype!

It gets better.

I found out after (if you're trying this out at home, it may be wise to check out the space before) that one tea light tray fits perfectly in my drawer and takes up way less space than an ice cube tray!

If you care to do the math, if I were to create enough trays to fill the space, I can now store ninety-six pairs of earrings in the same amount of space where I used to have thirty-two.

And I now only use half the drawer, and can use the other half for other things!

What an amazing recovery of poorly used space.


Operation: Success