Belatedly ...

... I really should mention that the Southern steampunk cons, Upstate Steampunk and AnachroCon, are well worth the trip.  I was a vendor at Upstate Steampunk at the beginning of the month.  It was a delight to meet so many fans of such vastly varying ages -- including many of my and M's colleagues, hers at Clemson and mine at the tech college!  This included Gypsey Teague, a lovely lady who makes killer chainmaille weaponry and who organizes the event with her partner.  Overall, the con was small but profitable and with superb gaming, and despite a giggling militant vegetarian who thought she was a pagan but didn't know what a solstice was at the next vendor table, I was delighted to meet a number of other vendors of clothing, jewelry, embroidery, fine art, etc. who were simply a pleasure.

I also had the great fortune of seeing some delightfully colorful steampunk outfits, including a young authoress who had assembled a brilliant bustled tatterpunk outfit in animal print.  It worked beautifully.

M and I did some fun multicultural stuff, including (for me) a Scottish-inspired pseudo-military ensemble with a vintage woman's kilt, a wool beret, and rendundant eyewear; and (for both of us) Anglicized/Orientalized North African outfits.  Me as warrior, M as harem girl.  She pulled it off with her usual aplomb.

Please, Southern steampunks: plan for AnachroCon in Atlanta at the end of winter and Upstate Steampunk next fall.  I can staunchly assure you that you won't regret it.


Available here.

In praise of procrastination, and Star Wars

"What should you have been taught in the LIB100 class?" queries the bulletin board.

See, I do a lot of work in Clemson University's library, down in the basement next to the Congressional reports from the 1880s and the shelves of appendices to the Iran-Contra investigation, and the entrance on the floor above is dominated by a bulletin board on which students are asked a different question each week, ranging from "Give us a midterm assignment!" to the above.  Rainbow sticky notes and markers are provided for answering.  I stop and read them every Monday; they're like one of those witty, brilliant Facebook or Twitter conversations in concrete form.

My second-favorite answer was this gem of wisdom: "That procrastination is inevitable ... grab a coffee + embrace it."  This is one of those important lessons I learned in college that it's hard to convey.  Sometimes, you just work best under pressure.  Sometimes a task needs to be completed in one marathon block.

Interestingly enough, the students who best understand this, I've found, are ex-military men.  I assist a few in the Writing Center, and generally they're not coming in an hour before the paper is due wanting to be told how to make it an A, but coming in a couple of days before with a polished product waiting for critiques.

In every tutoring position I've had, I've realized that moral support is a massive part of my function.  My entering freshmen, smart kids who'd happened to flunk the Writing Placement Exam for one reason or another, had overall much higher GPAs than freshmen who didn't have tutoring; a success for the pilot program I was working for.  They often found my editing and chatting about their topics useful.  And yet I'm tempted to suspect that a significant part of their grade increase might have been as a result of having someone to ask where they could go to get the free cough drops and stress balls, what recourse they had if they were being taught by an incompetent TA (or a competent TA and a lazy professor) -- someone whose dad was the football captain in '85 at the high school where they graduated in '10, someone who would listen as they talked about their depression over being unable to bridesmaid at their sister's wedding due to an exam -- someone to suggest a mediator for roommate disputes.  Someone, in short, to talk to.

I'm less patient these days with students who spend their half-hour appointments telling me how hard everything is ("It's college.  College is hard," I want to say.  "Did you expect this was easy?  Do you think I did it because it was a cake walk?").  Yet I understand that this is part of my job -- not as large a part as some students like to believe, but an important part, like the secretarial work and plagiarism reports that also form part of my week.

And yet -- to circle back toward one of my points -- ex-military students don't tend to need this.  The student who recently returned from his tour in Iraq and who comes in with a bleakly and elegantly phrased cause-and-effect paper about how his PTSD has affected his wife doesn't want my sympathy, he wants me to help find comma splices.  He wants a good grade, not a shoulder.  The man who served for 29 years doing First Aid training is far more interested in whether he wants "quicker" or "more quickly" than he is in telling me how difficult it is to be a returning student of non-traditional age.  I'm not saying these issues aren't hard or deserving of support, only that it's nice to be helping people by providing them with my expertise, not by functioning as a listening ear that anyone could be.

It was the above-mentioned First Aid trainer who explained to me why military students don't seem to have a problem with procrastination.  "You don't get advance notice," he told me.  "You're given a project and you do it now, and if you complain you end up with more work and the same deadline."

"So you don't have the same trouble handling the stress of it?" I asked.

"None at all.  This is business as usual.  You get the work, you do the work as best you can in the time you have."

Bravo, sir!  That's a healthy attitude for all college students to adopt.  Procrastination can be treated as scheduling if a student is well-acquainted with his or her working pace and ability to cope with the stress of the fast-approaching deadline.  Now that's a real life skill -- one that I'm still developing as I learn how much copywriting I can actually do in a given period.

My favorite note on that board, however, wasn't actually the one about procrastination.  It was the green one that asserted that LIB100 should teach students how to "bullseye Whomprats with a T130."  A blue one below advised the original sticky-noter to turn off his targeting computer.

The world isn't doomed.

Making the blog a blog of merit: Let's see how far we've come

Happy October!  I've been desperately looking forward to fall ever since I moved here, and I can happily report that it is worth it.

Anyway.

Three years ago when I started this blog, it was the irregularly updated chronicle of a semi-itinerant California college student with a struggling jewelry business who did a bit of writing on the side.  Now it's the regularly-scheduled ramblings of a South Carolina copywriter who works at a college and runs a small online jewelry business on the side.  Life is weird and wonderful and it's taken me for a bit of a ride.

This blog will shortly be going back over to an irregular schedule of updates.  Blogging is starting to feel like doing for free what other people could be paying me to do -- so it's time I scale back.  I expect that this will vastly improve the merit of the content ....

... and frankly, I've been doing this for three years.  I think I have a sufficiency of Jewelry Blog Content (TM).  And to the rather small extent that this is still a marketing blog, I'd rather pitch myself as an interesting person than Another Jewelry Person Who Blogs.

Expect an oddly spaced soup of treasuries, against-the-grain business advice, shopping recommendations, press releases, item photos, shop announcements, and links to interesting stuff.  I think that you-the-readers will enjoy it more (and hey -- leave me a comment sometimes, okay?  I know you're there via Analytics, but it's quiet here).  And I think that I'll be giving you more interesting stuff to read, even if there's less of it.

And I promise not to become that blog that consists entirely of posts apologizing for not posting more.  Pinky swear.

Social Justice: Why yoni jewelry bothers me

I am troubled by the yoni jewelry on Etsy.

This is not to say that I'm troubled by the concept.  The original notion of the yoni is part of tantric sex practice, as I've been writing about for one of my copywriting customers: basically, "yoni" is Sanskrit for "divine passage," and it refers to the vagina/vulva as a sacred temple.  The penis gets a similar reverence as lingam.  All well and good.  Sex is sacred and beautiful.


It's hard to post even the very lovely examples of yoni jewelry in a post like this, so here are some cowrie shell earrings from D Rae Designs.

I think the problem comes in when women (and men) who have little interest in the Tantra adopt the idea of venerating the yoni.  The thing is, once you're worshiping something in a vacuum, you automatically mentally remove it from the realm of everyday practice.  To decide that we are now going to revere the vagina as sacred rather than thinking of it as dirty turns the vagina into a concept that is beyond the woman.

If my vagina is sacred, it doesn't belong to me.  Sacredness implies worshippers, implies a social construction and concept that is larger than myself.  I don't want to think of a part of my body as filthy, as shameful.  But I also don't want to think of it as bigger and more sacred than the rest of me.

I'm all for resisting the idea of shame, but replacing it with the idea of sacredness, without understanding the yoni concept as part of a whole person, doesn't grant a woman control of, ownership of, and pride in her sexuality.  It only estranges the woman from her sexuality in the opposite direction.

So all that polymer clay yoni jewelry on Etsy (some of which, admittedly, is lovely)?  When I look at most of it, all I can see is a woman desperately resisting the idea that sex is dirty ... by putting it away from herself and her life entirely, promoting it as a passage to the sacred experience rather than a part of herself, her sexuality, her pleasure.  How is this different from the Victorian narrative?  How is this helping anyone?

Recent Discoveries: A slice of tofu and a slice of life

Southern Fusion Broiled Tofu

Easy, simple, and tasty.  Take a block of tofu and press it in a tofu press, or do what I do and wrap it in a dishtowel and pile a plate and about ten pounds of cookbooks on it, then leave it there for 20 minutes.  This will press out some of the moisture, leaving your tofu slightly denser and more able to absorb marinade.

Cut the tofu into quarter-inch-thick slices.

Whip a quick marinade of approximately one part hoisin sauce (or similar dark, thick Asian sauces might work) and three parts commercial sweet tea (use the good stuff; I used Beacon Drive-Inn's signature iced tea).  Make just enough to coat your tofu.

Drop your tofu in the marinade in a sealed container, roll it around until the slices are coated, and leave it in the fridge for an hour or two, turning it over every so often.

Lay the slices on a lightly greased cookie sheet and broil them five minutes.  Turn over and broil another five minutes.  Serve hot, with hoisin sauce for dipping.

The flavor is weird but delicious, sort of piquant and hard to identify, and the texture is a delightful mating of crispy and chewy with soft, and a touch of crunch round the edges.  Hey, I wonder if you could cut shapes out of them!

---

Unrelatedly, a thing I found out while I was doing copywriting research: Someone on the internet is trying to get marijuana smokers to report how many zippy bags they use for their stash each week.  He (I'm assuming it's a man, but I don't know why) will then work out how many zippy bags are used for this purpose nationwide, and report his findings to Ziploc in hopes of gaining corporate backing for the next push to legalize marijuana.  And this is why I love the weird world of the internet.

A linklist, which should really be one word

... this spammy blog (is there a term for this?) uses an article I found while trying to discover M's Ratemyprofessor rating, and it is just about the funniest damn thing I've ever seen.  M and I did dramatic readings to each other.

Is this a thing now?  Seriously someone -- is this a thing?

On a more relevant-to-anything note, here are two of the many cool things I've turned up while doing the copywriting for this lovely site, Keys of Paradise:

This mellifluously written essay on musk is fascinating, informative, and a truly beautiful piece of online writing which is a superb example of structuring lengthy content for the Internet reader.

There is an loa in the Voodoo tradition who protects abused women and lesbians, hopefully not always in combination: Erzulie Dantor.

And everything I ever wanted to know about alchemy can be learned from these sites: Alchemy-Works, which does sell some of its products but is more valuable for its wealth of information, and <"http://www.alchemylab.com/guideto.htm">a page on which I have wasted hours which  gives the alchemical properties of hundreds and hundreds of ordinary foodstuffs.

On a vaguely related note, many props to the makers of the Mystery Case Files games, available from Big Fish Games and on disk at many fine department stores.  They're a combination of hidden-object with item-adventure games; they capture the essence of the greatest old-style text adventures in their snarky humor, intertextual references, and complex plotlines, but are also absolutely state of the art in graphic rendering and in the incorporation of live-action film with digital art scenes.  They have a smoother and more graceful user experience than their imitators as well.  And, as I was playing the latest entry, "13th Skull," between pages of my novel-sized list of item descriptions, I realized they also apparently have a really excellent cultural consultant.

"13th Skull" has a few problems in terms of atmosphere, notably the fact that while the previous games, "Return to Ravenhearst" and "Dire Grove," had an engaging and incredibly atmospheric creepiness, this one had sort of a hokey Scooby-Doo ghost feel.  I'm quite willing to believe that this was deliberate (M was not so kind about it), but it's a little startling -- perhaps it's the lack of a well-developed and sympathetic victim to save.  Or the fact that there are about four actual Southerners voicing the Louisiana residents.  Anyway, the point is, despite the oddly built atmosphere, every depiction of voodoo and hoodoo spells is, as far as I can tell in my admittedly amateur experience, perfectly accurate.  Right on!

Crap, this post has no subject.  Unrelated photo time!


Available here.

Seven Weird Colors and the Sellers Who Love Them

As may have become obvious to everyone, I have a massive thing for color names.  Here are some colors from Wikipedia's list with cool names, cool backstories, or both, and the Etsy items that are tagged with them:

The color: International orange, which appears in a number of service organizations' marks and on World Football League balls.
The item: Seven sellers have tagged eight total items as International Orange.

This hand-braided Maharan wool rug by mrsginther, who also has a great profile page, warns your friends of narrow stripes of high-atmosphere conditions.


The color: Fallow, one of the oldest color names in the English language, referring to the sandy soil of a fallowing field.
The item: It took some manual counting due to synonyms and misspellings of "follow," but there about 26 handmade items tagged with this color.

The porcelain Lucitano horse ornament by SandrasShop reminds your equestrian of his equally old and proud tradition.


The color: Mountbatten pink, invented as a naval camouflage color that only worked part of the day.
The item: Only one item tagged with this!

This crocheted poncho by HEraMade lets you blend in with crocheted naval sunsets.


The color: Fulvous, which chiefly describes birds and means "kind of tawny rufous burnt reddish orangish yellowish grayish, kind of."
The item: Seven sellers tag one item apiece with this color.

This print of an original acrylic breastfeeding painting by h0neyburn uses the name to describe the color of the outline of a well-fed toddler.  h0neyburn uses a lot of these color names; I keep seeing her stuff pop up as I search.


The color: Isabelline, apocryphally named after Isabella I of Castile, who vowed not to change her underwear until her husband had broken a seige; victory unfortunately took eight months, at which time her small-clothes were understandably no longer snowy white.  Isabelline or Isabella palominos, the very pale-colored specimens of cream-gene horses, are named for this tint.
The item: A whopping 39 items are tagged with the color name isabelline.

This plump crocheted heart by Sabahnur looks nice and clean against your hair on a headband, and if you have a cream palomino, you can match!


The color: Falu red, which is after a paint made of starch and very finely divided hematite, and is used to paint traditional Swedish homes -- a bit like haint blue here in the South.
The item: Five sellers use this color to tag a total of 11 items.

This set of twelve organza blossoms brings traditional Old World color to your modern garment.


The color: Urobilin, named for the organic pigment responsible for the color of urine (yum!).
The items: Four sellers win the "I didn't note the Latinate root" award, and perhaps ironically, all four items are so lovely I couldn't pick just one.

The elegant vintage-style glass and dyed jade necklace by thebeadedhound will have part of its proceeds donated to coonhound rescue.  The set of 8 shabby chic hairpins by hbs1406 are stunningly photographed and would be gorgeous for a fall wedding.

A Review of Pottermore by Someone Unaffiliated with Sony

So, as longtime readers have certainly grasped by now, I have something of a love for Harry Potter.  I spoke on gendered intepretations of the broomstick as symbol in modern literature at the 2009 convention; here's some of the massive amount of Potter-inspired jewelry I've made (please excuse the older photos):





So it will surprise no one that M and I were among those who fought for a place in the beta for Pottermore, which is supposed to be an interactive companion to the books containing more information about minor characters, ghost plots, and other things that weren't told in detail within the scope of the series.

Overall, we've found it interesting but disappointing.  Most of the problem is in the advertising.  There was a massive amount of hype for this -- website countdowns, early announcements, competitions for early-admission spots -- and it was not made entirely clear whether this was a game, or a bunch of illustrations, or an interactive ebook ... or what.

It's set up like a collection of illustrations tied to a social-media game.  There are quizzes to take and House points to earn, and there are some little side games, like potion-brewing and spellcasting.  However, the actual game bits tend to be buggy and unresponsive, partly because the servers clearly weren't ready when early registration was first opened and partly because, well, it's in beta.  But ... there's nowhere to give specific feedback.  There's a generalized feedback form that asks you to give a one-to-four rating of how it works, how it looks, and "how you're liking Pottermore so far," but no way to say "When you try to make the Herbicide Potion, the worm mucus isn't clickable; you just pick up the Valerian if you try."  Which you'd think would be the important thing about doing a beta run.  It's starting to feel like all they really wanted was a demographic survey.

The ... I don't even know what to call it, because it's not a game or an ebook or anything really ... Pottermore is unquestionably beautiful.  Each chapter of the book has two or three corresponding "moments" you can access through the ... here we go again ... through Pottermore, and each "moment" has a multi-layered artwork.  Chapter thirteen, the one with Norbert the dragon in it, is absolutely breathtaking. 

And yet there's nothing to do.  You get to collect books and objects throughout the scenes (though in the really lovely chapter, there's not a damn thing to pick up ... and you still end up having to look), but there's no competitive aspect -- it doesn't really penalize you for not finding the jellybeans on the train -- and there's no reward for finding everything.  A few things, when you click on them, will unlock interesting extra information that's been written for the ... for Pottermore.  For instance, there's an entire biography of Professor McGonagall that you pick up over the course of the story, a few paragraphs for every chapter in which she appears.  This is quite worthwhile for people who enjoy the series.  There's not a lot of information -- there's a lot less than the advertising suggested there would be -- but it's worth playing through for it.

Yet the social-media aspect of the ... thing ... seems to imply that it was imagined that people would sink time and effort into Pottermore.  Would return daily to try to earn House points.  But the part that was hyped, the companion to the books, takes less than a day to "play" or "read" or "work" through per book.  And here's the rub -- the books open one at a time.

At this point, the only thing I'm returning daily to do is to check whether the next book has opened up.  Sometimes I try to make a potion, but the timing on this requires you to either find 90 minutes of stuff to do in Pottermore (difficult) or set a real-world timer (I'm resisting the nerdiness).  As of the end of August, it was still only the first book.  With overall opening slated for October, I'm not sure how they're planning to beta later book-companions at this point -- there's just no time. 

The material shows a lot of promise, but Pottermore can't decide what it is.  This cripples the game because it cannot meet the expectations raised by marketing, weakens the storytelling because the different aspects seem to have been developed at the expense of one another, and distracts from the companion information because the reader is treacherously wondering, "This is all?"

Pottermore could have been a great advance either in interactive reading, or in book-related gaming, but it tried to be both and therefore is neither.  It tried to be something new so hard that it isn't anything.  It has potential as a stepping stone, and it's still worth playing/reading/social media-ing/whatever, but don't expect your mind to be blown.

It's my birthday and I'll talk about buttons if I want to

Yes, in fact it is.  My age is a palindrome for the first time in eleven years!  And until midnight M and I are only 8 years apart!

The buttons from the necklace I posted last week came from the single best deal I've ever gotten on vintage buttons.  Here's another made from buttons from the same lot:

 
Available here.

It was at a yard sale, and the guy selling them had sorted them into jars by color and clearly knew they were of value, but some jars had a horrifically foul-smelling mold in them, so he gave me a price cut on all of them if I was willing to clean them myself.  It turned out that only one jar had the mold, and the smell in the others was merely the natural consequence of putting lots and lots of Lucite in an airtight glass jar for a couple of months (Lucite stinks a little; it contains some kind of acid whose name escapes me at the moment).  I scrubbed them all with toothbrushes and buried them all in coffee grounds, and only ended up losing the one jar; the rest smell just fine, and there wasn't a single junk button.  All primo vintage stock.

Consequently, I can afford to do a special offer on stuff from that lot.  So here it is.  Buy two items, at least one containing buttons (look here), and get 20% off on the lower-priced item when you check out with the code "Lucite always kinda smells if you seal it in a glass jar for a month."  Spelling doesn't count.  Add the code to the Note to Seller when you buy and I'll give you the discount within 24 hours through PayPal.  Offer lasts until11:59 PM on September 30.

A shopping guide

If you have a bit of back-to-school shopping left to do, or (like us) you work in education and the first paycheck after Starvation Summer is burning a hole in your pocket, check out the shops of some of my recent Etsy copywriting customers:


Is liberal guilt about brown-bag lunches setting in hard yet? Reusable bags from SeaCute Designs, whose profile page I wrote, are surprisingly affordable for the category, and appear nicely made and rhapsodically cute; the very professional shop owner donates a portion of proceeds to Feed the Children.


For playing after school, tutus from avasmommy07 are made with lots and lots of US-made tulle so they're soft and poofy like the imaginary fairy princess gown you had when you were little. That isn't the item I wrote the description for; I just love that picture, which balances posing and naturalness so well, and which has a very nice contrast of background and foreground.


This purse hanger and similar ones from talented Etsy graphic designer Topview are great; original artist design, and those things are massively useful when there are narrow aisles between desks (one particular classroom in the anthropology department at UCR, in Watkins Hall, was pretty much where we shoved all the spare furniture so they wouldn't take it away before we were able to lay claim to another room. We guarded our classrooms jealously so we could keep artifacts and posters in them. But that room was hell on earth in the summer).

Topview also does very cool Etsy banners -- and, as you can see, very crisp professional photography. She's one of my absolute favorite customers so far; I edited the content for her very useful website for international students hoping to apply to colleges and universities in the United States, which I'll link to once it goes live.

Treasury Wednesday: I'd shank a kitten for a slice

Until a couple of years ago, I never actually liked watermelon, so it was always canteloupe and honeydew I got at summer gatherings. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that canteloupes don't exist in America. Technically, they're muskmelons. We just call them canteloupe. Actual canteloupes are only available in Europe and Australia -- where I think they're called rock melons or rockfruit.

Funny old world.

There are some neat, weird things in this treasury, really different and cool. A beautiful collection of Etsy's real best, not Etsy's bestsellers.

'Muskmelon Pleasures' by Scribblegoat

Music and food-inspired designs, in rich melon oranges. What could be better?

Bailey Woodland Whi... baileybowls $19.00	Gallop, Canter, Fox... WildLifePrints $20.00	Upcycled Linen Cant... thehighfiberco $27.00	Acoustic Guitar Per... fionadesigns $20.00
Buy 3 get 4th FREE-... songsparrow $	she heard music eve... corid $20.00	Traditional Turkish... Kitty016 $16.90	Wood Fired Bottle a... earthfired $50.00
ballet russe BalletArt $18.00	Cute Pincushions f... BelleCoccinell... $33.00	Goldfish Cracker Ne... BitOfSugar $12.00	Marble Coaster (Mus... j2studios $9.00
Creamsicle Melon Mu... KarinLorenc $20.00	Sweet Slices an Ori... ArtByTemple $165.00	Citrus - Fine Art p... honeytree $30.00	Cantaloupe Bowl-Set... vegetabowls $72.00

Treasury tool by Red Row Studio.

Instant Vintage

Available here.

What is it about this color combination that screams "vintage"?

I mean, naturally the color of the large plastic/resin buttons is very vintage -- I generally refer to that shade as "60's peachy pink," though from a quick consultation of that ever-handy resource, Wikipedia's list of colors by shade, I suppose technically it's coral.  (Random side note -- I'm that weird genetic anomaly, a colorblind female, so I can't actually distinguish a strong orange from a true red.  I have to ask M for a judgment of harmony if I'm designing in reds or greens, and it's made putting together the Mixed Media Packs for Ballet Llama something of an adventure.)

Anyway.  It's not the muted coral hue I'm referring to, but the combination of it with black.  Pink with black always looks either vintage awesome or modern tweeny "rock star" bleh to me, but this is a particular combination that M and some of my coworkers reacted to in the same manner.  Maybe it's the blue-black jet hue of the blacks that's doing it; that's also a very vintage-feeling color.

This, incidentally, is also one where I bit the bullet and included a photo on black, which may or may not have actually been a good idea:


But it looked too bizarre with black at the edges and white in the middle, and this gives a truer idea of the variation among the buttons, so this was the only way to make the contrast work.

In general, these aren't great photos. I'll need to rework the cropping, I think, and try for a deeper focus.

But hey, check out those great 1960s flapper-style rose beads!

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

We're a little ways back into the year now -- and incidentally, this is the part I dislike, because no one has papers yet so there are almost no students, except for the panicked older students who are expected to use technology, but aren't being taught to use it.  The other day, M and I worked with a very nice gentleman.  She taught him to make capital letters on the computer.  I taught him how a printer works.  She taught him to use the mouse.

There is a lengthy diatribe on educational priorities in here somewhere, but I will limit myself: Did it ever occur to anyone to maybe require a computer-usage placement test?  It's seemed to me since high school, when I volunteered to drive some of my friends home after they missed the bus staying late in the computer lab, that the requirement of technology usage reinforces class distinctions in educational opportunity.  Clemson University requires that every student own a laptop -- and in my current still-a-bit-under-the-weather state I can't decipher whether this fixes or exacerbates the problem.

Anyway.

We've gotten started now, but before we did, M and I went to spend a couple of days in Asheville, North Carolina, where O. Henry lived for a while.  We went on the first day to Biltmore, the Vanderbilt family's estate.  After looking at the website, I came away with the impression that it was where rich people go to buy expensive branded wines and jellies and be rich together, but M's grandmother was kind enough to give us tickets and it was absolutely and completely worth the trip.

I've been to California's Hearst Castle, which is a melange of stuff imported over the Atlantic to build a fantasy Mediterranean village -- the architect called the style of that place something like "Franco-Anglo-Arabesque-Mediterranea-Japano-Rusko-screw-the-look-whatever-my-client-wants architecture."  Biltmore was a useful companion, since it is also a very Victorian-American estate -- appropriated spoils of empire and of education, combining in a large, somewhat asymmetrical cathedral-inspired house on top of a hill -- but Biltmore is much better-designed, and you can see how people would have flowed through it, both the guests and the downstairs class.  It's useful to see how the estate would harmoniously operate.

Also, some very inspiring wallpaper-decor combinations, including some beautiful examples of using rich jewel tones to make the very Victorian damask and tapestry feel masculine -- I'd give a photo, but they apparently never release them, contributing to my previous impression that it was a fancified wealth getaway -- and some wonderful 1890s-1900s clothing was on display, including a probably Worth-inspired gown and several pieces with delightful nostalgic touches that made my inner costumer dance.

Also, this fountain:


This view of the gardens (August is not a good time for gardens in the Carolinas, but these still looked pretty good):


And this carved marble pillar from the outside, which I'd love to "translate" into a jewelry design, somehow:


As for dining in town: The Jerusalem Garden Cafe is out of this world.  We ate there the first night and went back the second.  Try their curried mango shrimp -- it's delicate and warm, not spicy, and is served over perfect couscous.  It's atmospheric and lovely, especially the floor seating, and the servers are wonderfully attentive.  Asheville's more famous Tupelo Honey Cafe, however, was terrible and not worth the wait.  M's meal, the shrimp and grits, was drenched in hot sauce (not listed on the menu) and too spicy to eat; when we remarked on it, the server suggested stirring it around a bit.  Mine was a fried chicken something-or-other and was too salty to have more than a few bites.  However, if you still want to go, the peach rosemary lemonade is delicious.

Asheville can be described like this:  If you took a mellower version of the free-spiritedness and general artsy insanity of San Francisco and fused it with the prissy exclusivity of San Diego, their hipster love child would be Asheville (two silent E's.  And it went to North Carolina.  You've probably never heard of it).  The shopping is delightful -- don't miss the Spice and Tea Exchange, where they sell ras el hanout with black pepper and hibiscus flowers, and also onion-infused sugar and powdered extract of burgundy wine.  Malaprop's Bookstore is also a must-do -- we shopped a while and then sat drinking their amazing ginger lattes for hours.  And Woolworth Walk is not to be missed -- yes, there are all kinds of little art studios down by the river, but they were like an IRL Etsy, so you might as well visit through a screen -- and also overpriced and of questionable quality.  Woolworth Walk is right in town and features some truly amazing art -- pottery, installments, and traditional.  We purchased, or rather my parents purchased us through the magic of plastic and our birthdays coming up, a piece by Brenda Marks.  It's a three-dimensional giclee over wood rendition of her photo collage "Serenity."  Here's a picture of it on our wall, but visit her site because our lighting does it no justice:


Doesn't the dark luminous aqua balance the red so very eye-catchingly?  Stunning.

As a matter of interest ...

While my suppliers are trying to calm everyone, the laws of supply and demand would indicate that turquoise prices are going to hit the roof again like they did in the 1980s.  China is going to be dramatically slowing its production of turquoise rough -- a couple of sources are suggesting that that country's output may fall by as much as 75%.


Available here.

While this is no doubt exaggerated, it has some interesting implications.  A lot of turquoise miners are going to lose their jobs -- but the loss of life in mining should slow too.  The environment around some of the turquoise mines should improve.

And as for what this will do in the jewelry industry ... well, turquoise was recently a Pantone Color of the Year, and it is still exceedingly popular, since it fits both the fruity jelly-bean shades that are in everything this year and the dustier ones predicted for next summer.  As the prices rise, we may see a surge in substitutes, like dyed or undyed howlite, which pleases me -- I much prefer howlite.  Turquoise may be found in fine jewelry more often than casual jewelry by the end of this decade -- as it becomes priced as a luxury, it may be paired with sterling, gold, and precious stones more often than leather, fiber, and bone.  That could conceivably redefine tribal/ethnic-inspired jewelry styles.

This will be interesting to see!

Unrelatedly, I am sick.  I do this every year, but usually I manage to weather it before the school year begins.  However, it's possible my body is still on California scheduling (UCR starts in late September) and thinks it's got plenty of time to be ridiculous.

A Little Grin

In the description for the earrings below, I actually used the one really cool thing I learned from the Etsy writing workshop: Using a quick, unusual story to explain damage to a vintage item.



Sold!

To wit: "The two large pearl beads have slightly different shades and imperfections (I like to imagine it comes of their being worn by a dangerous gang of flapper girls for a famous faux pearl heist), but this is barely visible and what can be seen only enhances the vintage feel of the earrings."


It's always nice when something you wrote makes you smile a little later on.  I got this feeling from the descriptions of some of the stick incenses for my current Elance client, too.  It's a high, like suddenly realizing that the beads are falling into an additional pattern you didn't even plan but which is perfect.  Flipping over a pancake to find you've judged just right and it's wholly fluffy, and melt-in-your-mouth gold.  Or perfectly executing a martial arts form.

Things I Am Slightly Chagrined By

1. I'm making more in a month of copywriting than I ever made even in Decembers from my jewelry business.  Admittedly, most of it's coming from Elance, but I've been at the jewelry for three years (going on four) and the copywriting for three months.  There is something slightly frightening about this.
2. I'm officially giving up the ghost on frontal toggles.  Every time a new Stringing hits the grocery store, there's a new and interesting way to put the clasp in front, to the side, as a pendant base, interchangeable, adjustable, convertible -- just stop.  I am going to accept that my jewelry has boring clasp placement, at least for a while.  I use too many different toggle designs (because I match them carefully with the piece's look) to put myself through this anymore.
3. Teapot earrings -- a billion variations on a single finding -- beat out every other category I can make for top jewelry sales ever.  Maybe this is less chagrin and more astonished laughter.  But yeah.

Sold!

Finding Changes

I like to delude myself that I make these posts so that when I'm rich and famous, my slavish scholarly fans will be able to date my work.  Also, I figure you customer types like to know I actually think about this stuff.

In the past, with some variations, I've used flat headpins and fishhook earwires, as such:


However, especially with doing all the bridal designs, I've occasionally ended up using ball headpins and French wires, as such:


Images courtesy Fire Mountain Gems.

I've just finally made the investment to switch over more or less entirely to the second option.  I prefer the look of ballpins, which give the effect of a tiny additional bead rather than a "stopper" -- and they mimic the look of hand-fired ones better.  Also, while I never believed all the people who told me this, the coiled fishhook wires genuinely don't balance quite as well.  Admittedly, I don't have problems with them -- and I send all my heavier earrings with rubber stoppers to solve any problems others with less beefy earlobes have -- but the ball-end ones give a touch of confidence.  And they're rarer, so I think they look more professional.

So I'll work through my former stock -- especially since there are some design types that the coiled wires suit beautifully, I just don't do them that often.  But overall, I've decided that it's going to be mostly ball-type findings from here on out.

With exceptions to be made, of course, for cool headpins like the enameled ones in these earrings:


Available here.

But ball earwires, anyway.  Although wrapping a colored wire over the coils might be cool ... I'm off to experiment.