Personalised Soundwaves Earring Organiser

Hi Instructables, here's how I made a personalised earring organiser for my wife's dresser, in the form of soundwaves generated from my own voice.

A couple of years ago, I 3D printed my wife some whimsical cloud earring racks for her birthday. https://www.instructables.com/id/Earring-Clouds-3D...

Well since then, her earring collection has grown, and those cloud-racks were over-crowded. So for Valentine's Day this year, I decided to make her a series of Earring Racks based on recordings of me saying lovely things to her. The notches in soundwave shapes make excellent places to hang earrings and necklaces.

Follow the steps below to make your own, or you can use my templates too if you don't mind me whispering sweet nothings to you too!

Step 1: Voice Recordings to DXF

This step is fun... or weird, depending on how self conscious you are about listening to your own voice.

Just open your recorder app on your phone and say some lovely things about your partner. Or you could say horrible things too and they'd be none the wiser...

I then converted these recordings to soundwave shapes using this website:

https://www.misha.studio/waveformer/

And then converted those .svg files to .dxf files for laser cutting using another online tool.

Again, use these websites at your own risk. Who knows how many people have access to me whispering lovey dovey phrases to them now!

Step 2: Editing Your DXF Files

The DXF files generated by the website were just a bunch of parallel vertical lines as shown in the first image.

So I took these lines to AutoCAD and drew a zig-zag line linking all these points into the classic 'soundwave' shape. A bit hard to describe, but just look at the picture for what I did step by step.

Finally I rounded the peaks and troughs with a 'fillet' command in AutoCAD to get nice smooth shapes.

If you don't want to go to this trouble, please feel free to use the attached PDF file. I won't tell you what words these were based on though, so you'll just have to guess.

Step 3: Laser Cut the Pieces

I laser cut these waveforms out of 3mm white acrylic, complete with 3 holes for screws.

I also laser cut out some clear acrylic spacers ('stand-offs') out of some scrap 10mm acrylic material.

(You could also do this with a scrollsaw and a lot of patience.)

Step 4: Mount Your Waveforms

I just mounted these waveforms onto the side wall of my wife's dresser with pan-headed screws, making some pilot holes first with a small drill bit. The small spacers provide the necessary gap to allow earrings to hook over the rack.

Indoor tip: I like to stick an old envelope with masking tape, just below where I want to make a drilled hole. This catches all the sawdust and minimises mess!

I just used a ruler and carpenter's square to keep the lines of the earring rack parallel and evenly spaced.

Step 5: Hang Ups

That's it! Now your wife can hang on to your every word. Or at least her earrings can.

The V shaped notches in the waveform work great for both hook-type earrings as well as stud-type earrings, as shown in the pictures above. Necklaces hook on easily too. My wife was thrilled that she could now see all her jewelry at once. And yes, it's almost completely filled already!

Enjoy!

(PS, this is my entry for the 'organisation' contest. So do give me a vote if you like it!)