A while back, I shared some tips on how to use acrylic risers to improve figure displays and I wanted to do a continuation of that post. I have a few 1:4 and 1:6 scale statues in my collection that I love, but each of them independently is too tall to fit into a shelf in my Ikea Detolf cases. The quickest solution is to just remove one of the glass shelves, but in the instance of my Volks Belldandy & Holy Bell statue, she only needs a couple of more inches in order to fit so it creates a large area of dead space over her.

If you’re living in a relatively small space, like I do, every inch of display area is precious so it really bothered me to have almost an entire shelf rendered unusable. This is when an idea came to Kevin: since we couldn’t stand the figures on a shelf, why not suspend them from the top? In theory it seemed like a great idea, but we needed to use something very strong but not too thick because we wanted to create the illusion of the figures floating. Strength was important because if anything fell, it could end up damaging a very expensive statue underneath it. He was inspired by some of the jewellery I used to make, and decided to experiment using nylon-coated steel beading wire and crimping beads. The steel wire has a tensile strength of upwards of 50 lbs and wouldn’t cause any damage to the figures being suspended from them. After a few years, we switched out the steel beading wire and used fishing line instead (which has an incredible tensile strength, varying depending on what kind you buy!) because it’s more transparent and looked much cleaner.

Here are a few of my shelves that use this suspended figure method – Continue reading →