What I Did On My Day Off

I was off of work today in observance of New Years Day.  My son had to go to school and my wife had to work, so I had the place to myself.  Thing is, though, my son had to be on the bus at 7am and my wife had to work at 5am.  That means, even though I was off today, I had to get up early and get Chris on the bus.

That didn't matter much, because I was able to go back to bed for a bit afterward.  After that, though, I really wanted to spend some time on the Man Cave.  So, I went to Lowes and picked up some stuff so I could try to properly display my Nolan Reimold batting gloves and also find a way to display some of my jerseys.

What I'm going to show off on this post is what I attempted for the batting gloves that Nolan Reimold sent to me.  Above, you can see on the tailgate of my truck: 2 bases, 2 tops for a bannister (I don't know the term) and 2 dowel rods (I ended up needing only one).  A few friends had recommended that I try to find jewelry displays or mannequin hands, but a simple call to my mother-in-law set me off in a much simpler direction.

So, with a little bit of help from my son (when he got home from school), I cut the dowel rod into 10 pieces, based on the lengths of my fingers.  Kind of.  I don't own a table saw or anything like that, so I just used a straight hand saw to cut the pieces (as you can see, they ended up uneven and a little off, but in the end they worked out.  The posts came with screws attached and the bases were pre-drilled, so they screwed right in and made a simple stand.  I inserted the dowel pieces into the fingers of the gloves.  They fit perfectly.  I slid the first glove on the stand and found that they still needed to be filled out some, so I put a packing peanut underneath the thumb and tissue paper in the upper part of the hand.  When it went back on the stand, it looked pretty darn good.  The fingers stood on their own and could be manipulated a little bit, so I moved them to my liking and went ot work on the second glove.

Here is the finished product.  I want to stain the bases at some point, but for now they work fine.  I like that the signatures are very visible and the gloves aren't just laying on the china cabinet shelf.  They definitely add something 'different' to my collection.

Here the gloves are in their spot in my china cabinet.  My Hall of Fame signed baseballs make a nice backdrop for the batting gloves.  I'm really happy with how the stands turned out and I really want to thank my mother-in-law for the great help.

What do you all think?  I am really happy with how this turned out and I'm especially glad that I was able to put them together myself.