New Jewelry Listings including Multi-Strand Items, Hollow Lampwork Beads, LOTS of Sterling Silver

So the other day, I’m going through a really old stash of beads and I’ve got this one sterling silver bead that’s rather tarnished. I start to shine it up and guess what?



Wow, makes me wish I remembered who I bought that from 12 years ago. Hmph! (In case you can’t tell from my photo, that’s copper under a rather thin coating of silver plate… so not sterling silver at all.)

I only have two sources for sterling these days. The above is one of the reasons I’m so darn selective.

Anyway, I’m a little behind on showing you some of the new listings (click a photo to go to the listing).

First up is a three-strand necklace made from hollow Lampwork beads.




And a necklace of bright Lampwork beads and decorated sterling silver.



A five-strand bracelet of Zebra Jasper, Swarovski Crystals, and Sterling Silver.



A bracelet of large Jade beads, decorated Sterling Silver, and Swarovski crystals.



And a simple bracelet of byzantine sterling silver chain and a single but stunning boro Lampwork bead charm.



“What other people think of me is none of my business.”

A Few New Creations and Some Meandering Rambling

Finally finished and listed that pair of wire-wrapped earrings (click on the photo for more info).



I noticed that I, the hardcore bracelet creator, have been a little skimpy on the bracelet front lately. So I pulled out some heavy gauge sterling wire and a handful of lovely boro beads and made this (click the photo for more info):



Those of you who know me well may not believe this next bit but… I’ve been working with seed beads this week. It helps to have a friend come over and show you how to do certain patterns. I’m half-way through my first project. Can’t wait to show you.

I went to Oakland yesterday to watch a hockey game and catch up with friends. Had a great time (and even squeezed in a fabulous lunch with Gabe). It was a good distraction for me... Mon’s team is in Fairbanks for the end-of-season Regional Championships. The final game is later today. No matter how it turns out, I think Mon’s team rocks! They are hard workers, great hockey players, and really nice girls. Also, I couldn’t be more proud of Monica; her stats in the first four games were:
95% (22 shots)
96% (27 shots)
97% (38 shots)
96% (26 shots)
That’s just wicked awesome!

Oh, finally picked up a small disk cutter. Haven’t tried it out yet, but hope to get to it soon. Gotta clean up the out of control work room… and then I was thinking of working on the book a bit.

My experiments with adding color to resin are still not going well, but I’ll continue, trying different techniques.

Okay, I’m going to admit a really bad habit I have now. As I’m doing stuff on my computer, I’ll come across a recommendation for a site to check out or a youtube to watch or I’ll open a news story and there’s a link I want to follow or anything like this. Here’s where the bad habit comes in… I open the interesting item in a new window so I can check it out later… and later is always filled with other things to do. So at the end of the day, I end up just bookmarking all these pages.

Well, you can imagine how this accumulates. Eek! Maybe you just can’t do everything you want to.

Bracelet Buddies, New Earring Designs, Homemade Patina Recipes, and Blind Spots

Finally finished that pair of elaborately wire-wrapped earrings. I’m sure they’re not elaborate by some people’s standards, but coming from a non wire-wrapping background… let’s just say it took more than a few hours. Tomorrow I’ll patina them, then it’s just a matter of photographing and listing.

In the meantime, I sold out of my first batch of “bracelet buddies”, so I quickly uploaded a second batch.

Here’s how they work…




And here are some of the awesome designs still available.





To see what else is left, click here .

I also put up a few simple earrings designs (click on a photo for more info).




HOMEMADE PATINA

If any of you like to mix science and jewelry, here’s a webpage you may enjoy. Science Company has a section on their website dedicated to Patina Formulas for Brass, Bronze and Copper .

They tell you what you need (ingredients) and how to do it (process). Some of the colors included are “Purple to Light Green”, “Golden Yellow”, “Antique White” and many more.

If you try any of these and don’t mind sharing the results, I’d love to post your work in my blog. Drop me a line. Click here to email me.


MISC: OUR BLIND SPOTS

Holy cow! I thought a blind spot was when part of my car blocks my vision. We really have BLIND SPOTS. This is incredible. Watch this: Video from wimp.com

If you’d like to see more from this guy, here are some YouTube videos.

Until next time… baby arctic fox…

Pinterest and Featured Artist Wesley Fleming

Pinterest

Do you know about it? Some people liken it to crack in its addictive quality. It’s a social photo-sharing website. It’s here if you want to have a look: PINTEREST .

Here’s the wiki definition: “The website and app allow users to create and manage theme-based image collections”

Here’s an article that makes me wonder how long Pinterest will be around.

I can’t imagine how big their servers are if they’re hosting all those full size images… I mean, there are millions upon millions.


FEATURED ARTIST

Now, I’ve got to show you an artist whose work entrances me. His name is Wesley Fleming and aside from his own informative website , he also has an Etsy shop .

Warning… bug glass coming up...
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You *must* check out his gallery page… incredible!

Thank you, Wes, for letting me share your awesome work with my friends!

New Reading Material, Trying to Work With Etsy's Relevancy Search Engine, and Earrings from Magazine Tutorials

Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?

Happy February, everyone!

Got my computer back. Yay! New harddrive.

So now to get back into the swing of blogging.

I decided to switch to Google Chrome, but I’m having some “getting used to it” issues. Namely, I’m confused about the how and where of my favorites. Hmph!

Finished, ravenously I might add, The Hunger Games trilogy.

I always find it sad when I finish a book I really, really loved. I find it so hard to find books that I love. Sigh…

Anyway, I downloaded two new ones. One is The Serpent Passage by Todd Allen Pitts and the other is Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World by Mark Williams and Danny Penman.

I started them both and so far, so good.

As far as tv goes, I’m addicted to Downton Abbey. I started watching from the start of the second season, discovered there was a first season, went back and watched the entire first season on Netflix, then re-watched the episodes from the second season also so they finally made sense to me and I could quit asking my mom questions like, “Which one is that again?”, “Is that his daughter or his wife?”, “I thought this guy already went to war.”

I’m astounded at how they all seemed interchangeable to me until I had some background (ie, the first season). I honestly couldn’t keep anyone straight. Looking at them now, however, after having watched the first season, I can’t imagine EVER mixing anyone up.


Etsy’s Search Engine

One of my projects for this week is to go into every one of my Etsy listings and redo the title and the keywords to work with their new “relevancy” search system.

I will:

1) Change my titles to an inverted pyramid shape with the first few words of the title being the ones I except to be searched on the most and tapering down to words least likely to be searched on.

2) Change/update my keywords (the “tags”) with what may seem like redundancy but according to Etsy will bring my items higher in the searches. For example, instead of keywords that say: “necklace”, “sterling silver”, “handmade”… I will now have “handmade necklace”, “sterling silver necklace”, etc.

I’ll let you know if I notice any changes in my stats. For right now, I’m going cross-eyed making all these changes. Hard to sit still for that long.

In the meantime… let me show you some new creations.

These two pair of earrings were made from magazine tutorials (I’m trying to actually USE some of the tutorials I’ve purchased and/or clipped over the years).

The silver ones aren’t clickable because they already sold, but all the other items should be clickable.




I added two more color choices of scatter bracelets.



The deer haven’t been around as much this past month. Not for US, anyway…