The 1930s are alive and well in the JoAnn checkout line

She was buying a returned package of Knifty Knitters, those circular things you use to make hats and scarves.

"They're sold as a toy," she was loudly telling the woman behind her. "But they actually work. I can't crochet anymore and I never learned to knit, and I have to do something." All well and good.

Then conversation turned to her ... granddaughter? ... and the young girl's own knitting. "Oh, she enjoys it," speaker said. "But she'd rather stick her nose in a book or go play outside."

That ... was not where I thought that sentence was going.

Two days past Earth Day and I use someone ELSE's post

I sort of wanted to write something for Earth Day this year, and then I kept thinking of an idea or starting to write and then getting depressed. I mean, I make jewelry out of soda tabs. I grow the occasional organic tomato. I take pride in the drippy faucets I jiggle until they shut off, and that's basically it.

And then I read this post on my favorite blog on Livejournal.

It is recommended reading for the day. That is all.

Lessons learned, Vol. 1

This is from my 2010 bridal line (available now at Iris D Bridal in Tempe, AZ, near Phoenix!  See what I did thar? Marketings!).  It's a sleek and sophisticated bridal collection with two necklaces, a pendant and a pair of earrings for a striking, dramatic and unified look.

The necklace on the left was the first piece. I'd originally made it in all white and hated it. It made me think of something my paternal-maternal-great-grandmother used to make -- while I have (and wear) a few of her pieces still, they're mostly not my style and definitely not what I was looking for.

Then M came over to see what I was grousing about. "Close your eyes," she ordered. When she let me open them again, she'd loaded one half of the necklace with black crystals and one half with fuschia pearls. I thought my line needed the chic, updated-classic look of the black, so it stayed.

The lesson? Sometimes I just need to let my girlfriend do it.

Today we play with ooshy stuff.

M and I spent the day folding laundry, doing our month's grocery shopping (no, really -- due to our weird housing situation we buy almost nothing that can't freeze), and making a papier mache display bust.

See, we're adding this line of chokers/collars to our joint shop and the damn things are bloody hard to photograph on my backgrounds, so we were going to buy a nice bust, but then the only one we liked that had a significant amount of neck and wasn't glossy or velvety or soulless and horror-inducing, like some of the older kouros figures or the mannequins from that one Ninth Doctor episode ... I've lost track of this sentence. The only one suitable was thirty-five dollars. Plus shipping.

When we were employed, we'd have done it. Now ... well.

So we're now making our own out of water, flour, and a roll of paper towels.

In other news, the spambotteer who's making all the comments with links to what I assume are Southeast Asian mail-order bride sites or something? They're not affiliated. In fact, I'd kind of like to beat them.

New Special Offer through May 7

Mother's Day is May 9 this year ... apparently there's a separate holiday called Mothering Sunday in the UK, which I didn't know. Anyway, it's already over.

The point is!

Nothing says "I really thought about this gift" like a matched set of jewelry. Therefore, I'll be running a promotion up to two days before Mother's Day:
When you purchase any item in the shop, take 15% off any item in the same color of equal or lesser value.

So, for example, you could purchase this bracelet...

...and these earrings...

Available here and here.

... and get 15% off the earrings, since both of them contain the color pink.

To get the discount, use the code bubble when you buy. Discounts will be given through PayPal.

And look into the new option I'm offering in my shop: Custom Personalized Gift Packaging! Buying this listing means you'll get a coordinating notecard that tells the recipient things like who designed their jewelry, why it was chosen for them, special features ... all the little details that make the gift special.

Someone actually asked me to do this for a custom order and I thought it was an awesome idea. Particularly for charm bracelets. Really adds to the wow factor!

Ancient beads

I was recently mentioning the ancient history of beading in a special offer post; for anyone who's particularly interested, I've run across an interesting new article on the subject on the jewelry-business Web site where I lurk. It's a quick little discussion but has some interesting pictures and links to an in-progress timeline.

I've written for the site before (here) and I'm playing with the idea of offering to do a little series on ethnic inspirations of jewelry. I mean, really, that's my field ("Deep in my heart, I'm a postcolonialist," I told M t'other day; "You being a PoCo person is not hidden in your heart," she retorted). An article on the multicultural influences of jewelry styles in Northwestern Europe and the United States would be right up my alley. Perhaps I could just narrow it to global elements in Victorian jewelry? Food for thought.

Garden Phase II in Operation

M's grandma's house has places with great sun exposure for vegetable growing. It also has places we're allowed to put a pot. It also has places where the dogs won't destroy everything. Nowhere, however, has all three.

So M and I spent today managing a semi-peaceful takeover of the end of my mother's garden bed at the other house we hang our hats in. It's a railroad-tie bed with organic fully amended soil in a side yard with southern exposure, the Holy Land of vegetable growers. There's dark green plastic fencing laid over the soil to discourage cats from doing what cats do in fresh dirt, so planting involves snipping away the one-inch squares until there's room to reach through the grid and dig.

We put in six red onions, three cloves of garlic, a zucchini, two muskmelons, Nantes Coreless carrots, red-cored carrots, Snowbelle radishes, and three bushes of edamame/soybeans. The soybeans are supposed to like this climate. The pot of lavender along the side of the bed is another story. The inside of the packet says that if they don't germinate in four weeks, we should pop them in the fridge for three weeks and try again. Seriously?

So I have dirt everywhere. This is good. Also, Etsy sales picking up, which is fantastic. Listing daily really does make a huge difference. Of course, at this point I'm selling something like one item for each twelve I list -- which is a weird way to do business, let me tell you.

And apparently the bridal store I'm consigning to didn't actually take my $1100 dollars retail worth of jewelry and take off running with it. In that week of total radio silence I was getting worried.

Learning experience, I keep telling myself. It's a learning experience.

New Special Offer through April 18

I've been thinking of making little placards for my sales tables telling the history of beads. Beadwork is an important part of some Native American artwork -- some of the beaded and quilled dresses from (I think?) the Southwest are bloody amazing, and the ancestors of the Incas did some interesting inlaid sculpture with them.

In the ancient Near East, many lapis and other gemstone beads have been found in excavations of the great walled cities of times past. A group of bored graduate students studying ancient Assyria once tried, with near approximations of the Bronze Age tools they found, to hand-drill a gemstone bead. It took about two and a half working days. I think the method of drilling must have been lost to time. The wealth to support full-time bead drillers would have been extremely limited, and beads are too numerous in the archaeological record for that to be the case. Maybe one day we'll discover how ancient gemstone beads were actually drilled. Personally, I think that would be incredibly exciting.


Available here.

In the next couple of weeks, when you purchase any item containing gemstone from my Etsy shop, you'll get 20% off any second piece of equal or lesser value. You can use this offer as many times as you want -- so, if you order a $25 necklace and a $12 bracelet that both contain gemstone, you'll get 20% off any other two items that are $25 and $12 or less.

And don't forget to check out Ballet Llama, M's and my joint shop! We're listing new items, including miniature embellished top hats, polymer clay art and Victorian-inspired collar-choker necklaces, and you can combine shipping between the two shops!

Experimental glee

Wandered around the backyard today using (mostly) our own jewelry collection to test out some fun and different backgrounds.  Having the Flickr account is particularly nice because it lets me experiment -- which I can't really afford to do with shop photos, since I've found a relatively unified background that works for nearly everything and I need a good consistent look there.

So, from the magnificently unkempt backyard of M's grandmother (weeding is my job, and I've been jewelrying instead), I give you:





Left to right, top to bottom:  (1) Glass and hematite piece made to match M's MLA-professional outfit -- a purple business suit with corset lacing.  Yes really.  (2) A ceramic heart enrobed in polymer clay and genuine vintage watch gears, strung with glass, antiqued brass, and intricate black cinnabar heart beads.  (3) M's copper wire, agate and amethyst ring.  I started making these mostly because I wear a 9 and she an 11 -- we have big dockworker hands -- so it's hard to find women's styles big enough.  (4)  Another polymer clay steampunk piece, this one teardrop-shaped and again adorned with real watch parts.  It's strung with glass and tiger's eye and represents my gleeful playing with Picasa effects.  (5)  Our shared academic good-luck necklace.  M wore it for all her Ph.D exams.

Again, these are mostly our own pieces, hence the lack of little "available here" clickytexts, but if someone feels like making me an offer I can't refuse ...