I’ve been struggling to find small shelves to display a couple items I have in my home gallery. Target and Lowe’s do have wall shelves, but they’re both too large and too expensive. The only shelves that fit my needs were Umbra showcase shelves, available from the Container Store and from Amazon. They’re still a bit pricey for my tastes—$20 for three 4.1″ × 3.1″ shelves—but they did fit my requirements perfectly and were easy to install.
A couple years ago, my friend Ivan sent me a care package with a number of small gifts. He folded this origami piece consisting of five interlocking tetrahedra for me, and it’s been sitting on my desk ever since. I recently started putting together a home gallery, and I wanted to display this on the wall as well, since it tends to get lost on my desk among the larger fixtures.
The Umbra shelves are really easy to install and have just a couple of components—the bracket, the mounting screws, and the shelf that slides onto the bracket and sits flush against the wall.
Ivan also sent me a couple Adventure Time toys, which I’ve kept in the ~*Collector’s Pack*~ packaging and hung on the wall with a hook. They’re next to a print of Lumpy Space Princess, also from Adventure Time. My friend Liz gifted me that print (check out her craft work!). My home gallery is half work from or by friends and half work by other artists, almost all those who I’ve met at conventions or other events. 🙂
I also have a Black Widow Pop! figure that’s been sitting hidden on the corner of my desk. I have way too many feelings about Black Widow, especially with the way she’s written in the The Name of the Rose run by Marjorie Liu.
Maybe in the future I can figure out a way to DIY a small shelf from a 2 × 4, but, for now, this is the best floating shelf on the market for my needs. 🙂 Let me know if you’ve come across or created other solutions for displaying small items on a vertical space!
