Four New Pieces, Two of Which Are Shop-Bound!

I promised pictures, and here they are! More, even, than you expected! Weeks 21-25 of my Year of Jewelry Project, as well. Feel free to take a look there, but here will have pretty much the same stuff, because I can't resist an opportunity to gush about my work when handed such a convenient way to do it.

Off we go:

First of all, two of these are at least partially video-game-inspired, so yes, now that we're past learning how much of a geek I am, we can get on to how AWESOME these things are.

The first one is just a big globe of tiger-eye which I bought because it reminds me of the planes of Oblivion from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion...a dark and shifting and mysterious black lava-rock landscape perforated with veins of gleaming, glowing lava. This dark blue tiger-eye, with its veins of red and yellow and its mysterious chatoyance, reminds me of the menacing, thrilling feeling of navigating through a magical and dangerous and hostile environment alone...

It's BIG, 21mm, and it's just a huge globe with no way to configure it any particular way...I, wisely, I think, realized that the best way to use it in a piece would just be to let it show off, turn as it would, and just be the spectacular stone that it is. Any bigger of a setting and the stone would be too big to wear...I just put enough copper on it to set it off and to keep it held secure. I've already worn it - it goes well with dark clothes, lends subtle interest, especially with a low-cut neckline. Personally, I love it. Subtle and dark and mysterious is a streak I definitely should bring out in myself more often.

These beauties are rough, unpolished nuggets of green tourmaline. Tourmaline naturally grows in a spiky shape, so "nugget" doesn't really work to describe it, but that's pretty much what they are. They're dark, dark green and when you look at them deeply, they shine with a glitteriness that is almost impossible-looking. As long as I can remember, I've loved things like that - again, the mysteriousness. You have to look deep into them to see their true nature, and that nature changes as soon as they move. I don't know why, but something fascinates me about things like that...and these are perfect in that way. Hand-formed chain means that depending on the angle you see them from, the chains themselves look completely different - they're either made up of s-links or a graduated series of rings. I think that that change, that ability to shift appearances depending on a gust of wind, is perfect for these stones, which change depending on the angle you see them from, how close you are, the light conditions, their vector and velocity...these are mutable as the wind, and I love it! And I hope someone gets that and loves them as much as I do, because I can't afford to keep anything silver these days. I may have to make some similar thing to keep, though, because Boyfriend of Mine loves these! It's nice to have a guy who notices your earrings, but man, does it ever make it hard to sell them.

Here's a view that shows off the two different views of the chain:

And here's a view that shows off the glittery shine of the stones:

This necklace was unexpected...I knew I wanted to do something with that awesome stone, and I was going to go ultra-simple with it, but somehow accents materialized, and then a bird swooped down to make a toggle when I tried to clasp it with a simple hook. So the egg is bigger than the bird - poetic license, okay? It's best this way - If I wasn't going ultra-simple and just putting the stone on a wire and hooking it up, then I need to have the balance that that toggle brings when it pulls everything together (literally). Otherwise it would be very unbalanced with the stone on the one hand, the open ring on the other, and nothing to finish the look. It wasn't intended at all to be a bird-themed necklace, and yet, that stone makes a good robin's egg, and the whole is like a cave painting of a serene spring scene; highly stylized, primitive-looking, rough, but pure in intent.



And....finally. This. Science Fiction, right here.

I don't actually know what this stone is, because the little card on the table I bought it from said "fossil jasper" - but no fossil jasper I've ever seen looks anything like it. I intended to go ultra-simple with this one too, but look what my hands did when I wasn't paying attention! It ended up being WAY more awesome. It gives me a really science-fiction-y vibe, and two of my friends told me that it looked like "Welkynd Stones" (a sort of magical relic) from the same game as I mentioned earlier, which we all play - and so I'm thinking of it as a Welkynd Stone, and it's my magic charm.
This is another thing I'm keeping for myself, not because I bought the stone for that purpose, but because now that it's made, I cannot sell it. At least, not yet. It's perfectly my style. It's happened before that for a week or four days I was completely in love with a piece and then all of a sudden I was fine to give it up, so maybe that will happen again, but for now, this is staying in my personal stash and that's that. The way the frame goes down only so far and no farther and no less far, it's perfect! The way it looks like it's floating in the frame is perfect! The contrast between the widths of all those gauges of wires, the wrap, the spirals, the binding wires - all perfect and exactly what I want and I love this piece. So much. If it goes up on the market, you know what a fickle heart my heart is...right now, it's MINE.

It's worth noting, though, that I have another stone just like this one, and I'd be fine with making another pendant like it. You know, if anyone wants one. Hehe.



So, that's my I-Made-Things post for this week! If you think things, let me know what they are!

Progress!

Some long-awaited progress: I have three pieces for you. I was in a rush on the way to the post office when I remembered I needed to take a picture of these, so the picture is pretty terrible. Oh, well. This was a custom piece. I like the colors but I might have actually preferred to make one in the zigzag form, because as it was I had no idea what order to put them in. I think I made a good choice, though, and hopefully she’ll like them!







This was a gift for a professor's wife (Yes, when I give gifts to men, they tend to be gifts for them to give to other people) because he helped me upgrade my computer. Clean lines, simple aesthetic, for a woman who prefers the red-brown sort of color scheme but is allergic to some metals (silver should be ok, but I can’t use copper as I normally would for that color palette) and so rarely wears earrings or any jewelry at all...reportedly she does have pierced ears, though. I considered making her something else, but a bracelet would be too much silver for me to give away, I don’t know her ring size and I’m not confident in my ability to make an adjustable one yet, and I try not to make my first insecure attempts in silver...and I’m best at earrings, anyway. I think they came out well, and I think that I managed to make silver and red go together! The lighter red is coral, the darker is brecciated jasper. Mission accomplished, now let’s hope that she likes them. I’ve never met her so I don’t have the friend advantage there.

The last one is one I’m rather proud of that spontaneously combusted out of my head in a 5-hour session of trying all new things. A double-wrap on one piece, a new spontaneously-devised caging method, structural improvising. I’d never even made a cuff bracelet before, but what I tried worked, and the “mistakes” I made ended up being the best parts. Here's another view:

These two cabs begged not to be put in earrings. Honestly I don’t really like when twin cabs are put in earrings because it looks like they’re supposed to be the same, the artist wants them to be the same, they’re trying REALLY HARD to be the same when nature never intended them to be that way. These ones are unique – one is more red and one is more green, they both like copper and they’d like to hang out together, thank you very much. At least, that’s what I think they were saying.

Anyway, I’m really happy with how this turned out because almost nothing on it is anything I’ve tried before. The method of caging is such that it requires every wire I put on it to be where it is, and because the wires brace against the stones, the stones keep the wires secure as well as the other way around. If I took out one of the stones, the other would not be secure anymore either. I think it’s poetic, for twins.

I’ll go ahead and call this a success. I think it’s the first cuff bracelet I’ve ever made. I especially like how I made up for my own insecurity – in trying out this caging method, I didn’t cut enough of the four cage wires to make a whole bracelet, just to try out the cage – so when it worked and turned out to be secure, I flared the ends (I added…flair. :] ) and added the rest of the bracelet not only for the usual old cuff structure but also for interest. Because I wasn’t sure of myself, the bracelet is more awesome. That’s my favorite thing about making jewelry, I think…don’t be sure of yourself, just do things anyway, and they’ll end up like that. If you’re too confident, you’ll fall into a rut of doing what always works, and if you’re too afraid, you won’t do anything…but be both, and your work will be unique and spontaneous. Score.

It’s also adjustable, I overlap the ends side-by-side for my tiny wrists, but for larger wrists it still stays on (even on me) when they point at each other. It’s structurally sound and comfortable. I’m really happy with how it came out.


Pricing:
Pricing is always a problem. There are lots of online “pointers” and “tutorials” and lots of advice on “how long did it take you? how much did it cost to make? how difficult was it?” These are all questions to which I don’t really have the answers. I have no idea how much wire went into that bracelet, for instance. And I spent more time sketching it out and miming wire shapes with my fingers than actually wrapping it. And then there’s the problem of, well, this took so much more effort than those silver earrings, I should charge a lot more for it, but then again the materials are less expensive and what if people won’t buy it?

A lot of advice is “test your market” - put your price where you want it, if the item doesn’t move, lower it, or move it to a better place in your shop, or raise your other prices to make it look less expensive by comparison...there are plenty of strategies and none of them are really helpful for me because “if it doesn’t move” is not really the exception to the rule, yet. Even my most popular things can go through a four-month Etsy posted cycle without “moving.” Testing my market takes more time than I know how to use, because most of my stuff still “doesn’t move” for a while. Does that mean that I need to be better at advertising, or does it mean that I need to fix my prices, my shop order, etc. for ALL of my stuff? ......*sigh* probably.

Pricing is the biggest reason I split my shop into two. Because comparing that bracelet to a pair of origami earrings is difficult when they’re “upcycled” - they take almost as long as that bracelet did, maybe even longer, but I sure can’t charge as much if they’re right next to them. Every time I’m faced with pricing another fine-jewelry item I’m reminded that I need to get my upcycled stuff out of that shop...but I’m reluctant to do it because it’s getting the most publicity and those are my most popular things. I’ll have to figure it out SOON, before review/giveaways start pointing customers at Letterbox Lion and The Winged Lion goes unnoticed, and people wonder where the cool upcycled earrings went.

Anyway, I have no idea how much ask for that bracelet. Rarr!

P.S., my Year of Jewelry posts for these pieces (okay, you've pretty much read them already but oh well) can be found here, here and here, respectively.

Weeks 17 and 18 are Custom Crane Earrings!

So I didn't post last week because I just had one custom order and the picture was terrible, so hopefully posting both pictures at the same time will make up for how awful the pictures are.

One of these is for a review/giveaway that is in the works, and the set of five is for a customer who bought a similar pair from me and liked it so much that she decided she wanted to give some away as gifts! As always, they take a long time to make, but I'm excited to have so much jewelry to make, so much in demand. So...*pant*...much...*pant*...work...Just kidding. Actually school just ended (finals still to go, though, but who's worried?) so I'm doing well...though, I did cut off a chunk of my little finger at work today. Oops! I have been assured that it will grow back, by my coworkers, who I'm sure would know.

Anyway, toodles! I'm in such a good mood!

YOJ Entry for Week 16

SPECTRUM - this is a short entry and I don't have that much to say about it, not because I don't like it as much as my other stuff, but because...well...it all happened so QUICKLY! It's like somehow managing to date a guy for only a week and then afterward trying to reflect on the relationship...it happened, I don't know what to say. This is what came out of it, anyway. It took me less than an hour to make and until it was done I wasn't sure what exactly I was making. It actually started out as a bracelet, true story.

Picture Jasper in a muted rainbow pattern suspended on hammered copper. When the pendant is hung, it balances itself out so that both sides have stones in a curve...how to explain it? The center is where it should be, where it was designed to be. I can't describe that any way other than "I might have been afraid it wouldn't work out, but it did." Maybe I ought to call it Harmony instead.

Something awesome for YOJ

This week's theme was "double-duty" - I hadn't really had any intention of following the themes, but this one piqued my interest. So I made a pair of bracelets that transform into a necklace.
The pictures are terrible...the copper looks like brass in them...but in person, it's very coppery and lovely and warm. Sigh!

You see, I made one big chunky bracelet out of fire agate, and one light and delicate one from handmade copper chain and carnelian. I made two different sets of toggles...one fancy clasp and one simple clasp. Then I put one fancy and one simple half on each bracelet so that they could be closed; the fancy one on the light chain is the whole point of the bracelet, being the biggest and only notable thing on it, while the fancy toggle bar on the chunky bracelet just goes with it and adds a touch of fanta carnelian to its fire-agatey glory. But when you match up the halves, fancy bar with fancy loop and simple with simple, they make a necklace with two neat clasps to transition between sections. And the delicate part of the necklace can go behind your neck where it won't bug you, and the chunky part can go in front where it was always meant to be. Lovely!

My pictures are terrible and taken with terrible lighting against a terrible background, but please bear with me.

I'm rather proud of these pieces.

However, the bracelets are very long and tend to fall off (though some bracelets are just designed that way), so I may do some reworking, taking out either a bunch of the smaller findings or a whole section. We'll see, I haven't decided yet...but right now the length is about right for a necklace, so I can't make them THAT much shorter. Regardless of the length, I'm happy with my work, here. I got bruises on my hands, though. Gotta toughen up.

Year of Jewelry 3rd go, and psychology

My third week into the Year of Jewelry Project:

A lotus pendant. I like the way this one turned out...the more gems I put on it, the better it looked, so it's definitely a step up for me, since I'm used to making smaller, subtler and less gaudy (and less expensive) things. It was also quite a learning experience in "use twice as much wire as you think you'll need". This includes bright and oxidized copper, peach moonstone, pink garnet, fanta carnelian, peach aventurine, picture jasper and sunstone. It looks nice with a dark green shirt, with its dramatic contrasts and fall colors.


In psychology class we are learning about the science of motivation. It's well-known (but little practiced in the business world) that incentives for something decrease performance...the higher the incentive, the lower the performance. At least, that holds true for things that require even rudimentary cognitive work...tasks that are purely mechanical are better accomplished with incentives than without, but nowadays, not that many people have jobs that are purely mechanical work. The best work is accomplished with "autonomy, mastery and purpose" - being able to do what you want went you want, being able to become better and better at something that matters, and feeling like you are contributing to a cause bigger than yourself, whether only a little bigger or world-wide. This rule has been noted by businesses like Google, whose employees are free 20% of the time to work on whatever they feel like working on...and about half of Google's most awesome innovations...gmail, for instance...were born from employees puttering around working on their own projects that turned out insanely good.
This is also what my boyfriend is going through, and struggling with, right now...the conflict between his class demands for code and his desire to make his own game. Google says: What kind of email client would you want to use? Could you make it? Go for it. Jeff says: there is a game that I want to play that doesn't exist yet. Can I do it? The fact is...he can, if he puts enough work into it...but no amount of money is going to convince him to do so, only the doing itself can do that.


The Year of Jewelry is giving me my non-incentivized rewards. I am not doing this for the money, though of course that is my "aim" - making jewelry started being less fun when I had to go through all sorts of rigamarole to do it...*had* to being the key word. Now, I still go through rigamarole, but it's a challenge! I made two pairs of earrings on a ballroom dance floor. I put six kinds of gemstones on a pendant because it looked best that way. I ran out of wire halfway through a pendant, and started up with another kind of wire, adding a cool vine effect at the bottom. I have ALL of my pictures formatted to go up on Etsy...my least favorite part. These things are obstacles to be overcome, not to complain about and use as a reason to not do any work.

Long story short: my productivity has SHOT UP over the past few weeks.

The reason for this is that now I have a different aim - to do work when I can (autonomy), to get better at jewelry-making (mastery), to get feedback(purpose), and of course, though most other people's YOJ contributions are far superior to mine, to show off. Granted, that "purpose" is only a little bit bigger than myself...but I envision things for it that are bigger than I am. I'd love to support myself on jewelry, though I know it's unlikely to ever happen that way. I'd love to learn until I master it and then to teach. I'd love to create things I can look on with wonder and not understand with anything but rationality how something so beautiful could have come out of me. You know, just the usual.

So thank you, Year of Jewelry, for putting me back on my track.

Another week of Year of Jewelry - Quick Earrings

I'm copying this from my post on the YOJ site:


I was quite determined to not fail the challenge in my second week of YOJ, but I had an immensely busy week and a two-day ballroom competition on the weekend…and right now I ought to be studying for tomorrow’s midterm, so we’ll see how that goes. I apologize for the quality of this picture, it was taken with my camera in horrible light in the middle of the MIT gym…I made these sitting on the floor in my ballroom dress and shoes! I’m proud of that (and of getting this up only one day late…I was proud of myself for being on time until I remembered that the week actually starts on Sunday. Oops.) :] We did reasonably well in the competition, too. My partner’s a good sport.

These are from the same hammered spiral frame, one version big and one small, but I went in completely different directions with them. To one I added a clear red garnet briolette to swing freely, and accented it with pinky garnet chips along the outside…the difference in color is hard to see in this picture. To the other it was rhyolite and carnelian and overlapped the frame…very different color schemes, there.

Sadly, I think I might have to redo them. I didn’t have 20G wire with me, so I made them with 16…not unheard of, but it hurts me to put them in my ears and a lot of people would not be able to wear them. Maybe I can avoid having to redo the whole thing if I take the hooks and shrink them into little loops and attach them to normal, thinner hooks. What do you think?

P.S. “Call the Law” by Outkast is a great quickstep song…for the first 2 minutes and ten seconds, anyway. My whole team loves that song now.

News: the new things

A couple of things. Spring break was fantastic...I got not nearly as much work done as I planned, which is probably as it should be considering my schedule lately...unfortunately, I got hammered with schoolwork immediately afterward, and I have not been able to go to bed before 3:30 am since break ended last Sunday. So forgive my silence, and here's some news and some pretty pictures to compensate.

I joined a project called the Year of Jewelry - it's a yearly project in which participants make a piece of jewelry every week for a year...obviously no promises, since the only free time I really have weekly is on Wednesday nights, and jehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifwelry-making inspiration is not something one can turn on on cue...but I managed my first week, at least. This is week 12, because the sign-up goes by quarters of the year, so I'm not starting at the beginning...I wonder if I should restart at week one next year or just go until week 12 again...then again, I guess it doesn't matter. The Project is a really neat forum full of people like myself, but people who know more than I do and are better at what we both do than I am. They are friendly and like sharing what they know, and I'm really excited to be in a community with them where I can make friends. If you want to see some really spectacular pieces (as well as some pretty normal pieces from people just starting out, like me) go visit http://www.bleilysgems.com/YearofJewelry2011/.

Anyway, here's my first post for Year of Jewelry:

This pair has been floating around in my head for a while like a blossom on the breeze. I wanted it to be extremely light and open like the first spring breezes that have been sifting through my hair lately...but knowing me, it had to be something small and subtle. I don't go for gaudy. So here's the result; they go very well with dark hair. I like the organized but somewhat chaotic wrapping of the wire and the contrast between the dark and light oxidization.

By the way, the peach head pins in the middle are exclusive to livewirejewelry and I have no idea how she makes them! A really interesting effect and the contrasts are perfect for flowers, looking like nature herself built them.

And, some more pictures! I went on a roll recently and then got a chance to take pictures over break.

These are in no particular order: celtic knot copper and sunstone earrings, copper and multi-gemstone earrings (that's lapis lazuli, chrysocolla, moss agate and sodalite), earrings of moonstone and sunstone, a mandala-style necklace of copper and carnelian tentatively titled "spokes of the sun", and some tribal-looking fishy earrings I think I'll call "Fossil".

Can you tell I've been having fun with copper?
The glow of sunstone is really hard to capture on camera, by the way...the problem with selling chatoyant gems online. Moonstone also glows, making those peach and orange earrings the most awesome piece of subtle work I've ever done.


The mandala necklace, by contrast, is big and not subtle at all. The bail is one of my better ideas, though I still might modify it - the wire is wrapped tighter in some places than others so that part of it seems to float off the chain. It looks really neat on...that was actually the necklace I was wearing when the man complimented me and asked me what my website was.


Those last ones weren't even meant to be fish. They just turned out that way. This is rhyolite - rainforest jasper, jungle jasper, basically these are amazon piranhas in a hammered-copper-ancient sort of look.































Edit: Due to a lot of comments on my Year of Jewelry post (the project, by the way, has already gotten me more feedback than I expected, I'm very happy about it) that said that the headpins in the earrings looked like "clean copper...just out of the pickle [solution]" I'm posting a couple of pictures of the other head pins that livewirejewelry makes, just as an example to prove that it's a mysterious process and they're not just shiny copper. My camera's not the best, so it's kind of difficult to tell.


The peach-colored ones are the ones in the project. The others are aqua and red, and I don't have those, these pictures are used with permission from Lisa at livewirejewelry.

Some pictures, some typos, customer service

I have no good excuse for being awake right now, except that I turn nocturnal during breaks from school...it's now 7:43 am and I'm thinking of making lunch. Anyway, forgive my abysmal grammar, spelling, etc. during these tough times, I'm only half-awake. I'm one of those lovable people who, when they get very tired, start to say things as though they were drunk, so if I say anything completely whacko, forgive. I probably won't notice for a while.

Anyway, some pictures.



These are the gifts I gave to my friends for Christmas. The first two were for my best friends from back home, but I had to ask them for forgiveness for how obviously amateur I am at wire-wrapping...I didn't have heavy-enough gauge wire to do the projects I was planning, and I did them anyway because I didn't have time to get more...so they're made with the wrong materials, improvised and basically practice projects. Leo doing whatever with her last bits of wire. But that's what they get for being friends with a jewelry artist...the ones that are good I have to sell, but they can have plenty of okay ones :) At least they said they liked them. But gotta love 'em, they'd probably say that no matter what.

The last one is made of half-used soldering wire (for a soldering gun) that I scavenged from the floor of the theatre shop at school (they were going to throw it away!). I said, "Evan! What can I make you for Christmas?" (By the way, it is VERY hard to make anything for men for such occasions when all one can make is jewelry.) And he said, "I'm asking my mom for a bag for Christmas. So make me something I can hang on a bag." And so I did. It turned out to be perfect, actually...the bag was leather, so it was a perfect color, and for some reason it ended up being the perfect size and everything. Serendipity. The thing is, I wanted to make a double-helix, because they're awesome. But I couldn't make a stable double-helix, so I made a 2D projection of one...a shadow, basically. (He's a computer graphics person. It works out.) It's easiest to see it (for me) if you look at one of the points where the wires cross and imagine that one is actually farther away at that point, farther into the screen. Then if you imagine that one alternating each time, you can imagine that it's a double-helix and you're looking at it head-on. ANYWAY.

I came into a lot of supplies recently...I say that like it was a surprise, but that's only half a joke. I bought a ton of wire and beads...and chain, and ball head pins...a TON, like, I've been getting so many packages...hooray for Etsy's supplies category, which can hook me up with $.70/foot oxidized copper chain. But the thing IS. I did it with money that was no longer capital. It was with the money that had gone into my paypal account from my sales. I used money that I had MADE to buy things to make more jewelry. That's how a real business runs, and I am putting everything I bought to good use, knowing the work I put into earning the money to buy it. It's much more rewarding than the office job I had last year (though of course I wish I still had one like that...). Also, my boyfriend's sister gave me a gift card to a bead store for Christmas, so I got to go a little crazy the other day...I spent like 4 hours in the bead store. Jewelry supplies are the only thing I can shop for and buy without getting horrible buyer's remorse, I don't know why...I'm terrible at shopping for that reason, but I love shopping for beads!

And I have been going so crazy making stuff that I'm out of wire again...at least I already bought some more this time, and won't have to wait too long. I'm making my entire stock of wire copper, at least for now, because it's SO much cheaper and looks fantastic anyway. Got tons of gems, mostly green and blue. Sodalite, tree and moss agate, Chrysocolla, a little kyanite. Then there's the fire agate in green, but also in red, with carnelian to match. I am so bad at pink, I hardly ever like it, and that's been a problem because most of the custom orders I get are for pink and I rarely think it looks good, so then I feel bad about selling it no matter how much the buyer likes it. However, I did get some awesome hammer-faceted rose quartz nuggets and some itty-bitty pinkier garnets and made some fantastic earrings, those should be up soon. Takes something really awesome to make me like a pink piece of jewelry. Once I really am at a loss for what to do without wire, I should get around to taking some pictures of what I've been making and putting them up on Etsy.


By the way: buy handmade. Seriously, since I started shopping for supplies on Etsy I have only looked back at my other supply sites to confirm that Etsy is almost always cheaper. Of course they usually do charge shipping, so it's sometimes more expensive...once in a while. But everyone is so NICE. A good 50% of the people I've bought from have sent me free gifts, one person sent some random other things like silver-plated toggle clasps and a few beads...the best ones are the ones that send extra of what you actually ordered, because then you know you can use it. I got 7 lapis coin beads instead of 6, 4 extra copper earwires, and one seller sent me 8 feet of copper chain when I had ordered 6 feet! Just one of those things. No warning at all, either, if I hadn't held it up to my 6-foot measuring stick (my boyfriend) I wouldn't even have known I had gotten extra. People are just very nice. The one order I had to complain about (I hardly ever complain, I promise) the woman explained that she employed kids to pack her beads, had probably just missed the problem ones, apologized, and offered to send me some more to replace the broken, sub-par ones that I had received.

It's probably a very exploitable system. Every seller on such a scale as a handmade goods shop wants her customers to be happy, especially in a forum like Etsy where there are direct repercussions if you don't live up to people's expectations...if you don't have 100% positive feedback, immediately people trust you a lot less, and of course you know you've done it - gone through the reviews of something or someone to find the person who thinks they're terrible and find out why. Buyers have been known to just completely make things up, being totally unreasonable, and that reflects not on their credibility in this case, but on the shop owner's. Nobody wants negative feedback, so every Etsy seller asks for communication and a chance to fix a problem before you respond negatively...and I've been reading lately about customer service and how annoying customers often get free stuff. I didn't want to be a squeaky wheel anyway, so I told her right out that A) I wouldn't give her negative feedback anyway, since the problem was so minor, and B) I would give her another chance if it was a fluke (which it seemed like, since my other orders from her were both fine), but she still offered to send me new beads. Long story short, the customer service on Etsy is fantastic.

I was worried about my own practices until I remembered that I've been sending mine in handmade paper boxes with extra origami...I think it's just a thing that handmade sellers naturally do. Nobody asked me for little paper stars or flowers, but when it came time to start packing things, I just made them and put them in.


And on that note! I'll leave you (at 8:45) with the last-bits-of-wire pieces (L-BOW, ahaha! Forgive me if I use that again) for that time of wire-having that just passed.

Gemstones

Yay! Two new items up on Etsy:



and





Told you I'd get to work. I have a few more, and they'll go up throughout the next day or so, and I'll get around to posting them on here.

This post actually has something to talk about! Rather than just a list of pictures. Though the first two things are (surprise!) pictures. I wanted to comment on the gemstone rating system. Look at these two pictures.
























































These are both of kyanite. One is shimmery (chatoyant, for the elitist) and one is transparent. Well, they're both shimmery. But one has, you know...stuff in it. Sadly, I don't have these...I just got the pictures from Etsy.
Gemstones are graded by "quality" - basically the appearance in terms of clarity, color, presence of inclusions and imperfections, etc. The clear Kyanite, for instance is grade AA...and if it were slightly clear-ER, it would be AAA. In general, the clearer a gemstone is, the higher-grade it is. And vice-versa. Of course, both kinds of kyanite up there are absolutely GORGEOUS. But I am of the opinion that often, a clearer gemstone is much less interesting, and therefore much less desirable. I was never a fan of diamonds...I told my boyfriend, if we ever get married, don't get me any diamonds...I mean, they aren't even a COLOR. They might as well be at least SLIGHTLY interesting as well as sparkly and expensive.

For instance, okay, it isn't true of labradorite that the high-quality ones are boring. Labradorite at all different qualities has different mystiques, and I like it when it's flecked and grey only slightly less than when it's clear as water up to its shining layers. But if it were entirely transparent, instead of just transparent to the point of showing awesome color, it would be utterly boring. While this is not true of the clear kyanite in the picture, for instance, most high-quality garnets look like red glass, and are almost indistinguishable from it at first glance.


This is what low-quality, bad garnet looks like. Bad picture, I know...out of focus, but you can still see the glimmeriness. I bought this at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History (which reminds me...) meaning to cage it somehow. I just really liked the shine that flashes from deep inside it. By contrast, high-quality garnets are completely clear...I mean, they're definitely PRETTY...And it's good to know that that color is made by nature and not a measured mix of chemicals...But if you search Etsy for garnets you'll come up with a lot of similar-looking things, and many of them will be glass that people just put "garnet" in the name because that is the proprietary name of the color. That and quartz - clear quartz is dyed so many colors that you even can find "emerald quartz" - emerald is a PRECIOUS stone, definitely not a quartz, but it can look like it, and trap blissfully unaware amateur gemstone buyers. One exception, though, is rutilated quartz - that's clear quartz with neat inclusions, mostly strands of gold-colored I-don't-know-what. That is rightly valued for (of course) how clear it is, but also how neat the inclusions are. That's more my kind of thing.

I don't mind using gemstones that don't have inclusions, if they're pretty, but the others seem so much more worthwhile. Basically, I've decided that I would much rather work with labradorescent stones and chatoyant stones...the ones that have STUFF in them that looks cool. Labradorite, seraphinite, kyanite, pietersite, tiger-eye. Low-quality of most things, like garnet. And of course, the ones like jasper, that aren't really gems but cool rocks...things are much more interesting when you can't get glass that looks just like it. No diamonds for me. SO BORING. Anyway, that's thoughts.






Also, here's a picture of the one that I just out-of-the-blue sold in person:



This one was the first I did with the stones in the previous post. I'm pretty happy with it...I was worried because the stone is so thick, and I didn't know if I could make it secure. I'm proud of the tiny and intricate work I did there, and all the extra flourishes just add to its stability. Of course, that's at the expense of hiding the stone a bit, but the people who said they would buy it from me didn't seem to mind.

Posting that garnet reminded me of some more pictures I owe this blog. This summer I went to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in D.C. for a day. I went to the gem gift shop and walked around, and of course bought some excellent fossils (and that garnet). I have some awesome ammonite to make stuff out of, and I've been meaning to post pictures ever since I got this blog. I keep forgetting. Maybe this will make me remember.

A Conundrum

I made a necklace:

Lariat-style(?...I think that's what it's called.) celestial-themed, long and silvery and neat. However.

It's designed specifically to look good on people of my body shape. Basically, it's long and it goes into your cleavage, to make it look like you actually have a little. It draws the eye downward. It is really not designed for people who ACTUALLY have cleavage, since I can easily see it getting really uncomfortable for anyone who has anything there. And while I can describe that in the etsy post, I think it's not very clear to just say "wear it if you have small breasts and want to show it off" - few people probably want to show that off, and it's difficult to make it clear that the necklace is designed to make your cleavage a little MORE impressive, not just make your lack thereof more obvious.
It's also a little long right now. I think I'll shorten it up a bit.
But meanwhile, do I take photographs of me wearing it, to show how it's supposed to look? Does anyone really want to buy something they have seen in someone else's cleavage already??
I'm afraid it would be misleading to just post the photos of it on the table because it's impossible to show the real size or scale or how it would look hanging.

It occurs to me to perhaps take the toggle stick off and thread the chain through the toggle hole. I'll have to look into that, too.

Yay, photographs! And a paragraph of bragging.

It's been so long since I've managed to take good photographs. Thank goodness for vacations...they are the times I can go to buildings that are well-lit. And be back to them in time. Since I moved to New England, the weirdest part of adjusting has been how early it gets dark here...Michigan is my home town, and it's as far west as you can go in the Eastern time zone, so where in Boston it gets dark at 4:30, (FOUR-THIRTY. AHHHHH.) it waits for another few hours back home. Oh, man, I need to make a lightbox. Oh dear boyfriend sitting next to me, want to make me one for Christmas?

Juuuust kidding. I'll get around to it. Life is oh-so-scattered and OH LOOK I HAVE A FOLLOWER. HOW DID THAT HAPPEN oh never mind I know you. I love you anyway! :)


So, the advice I've been reading is basically all "you need to re-do everything you've been doing." I'm working on adjusting my shop announcement to be more google-search friendly...and I have to do the same to EVERY SINGLE POST that I have made, and every one I make from now on.

The main thing, too, is "have a product that people want"...I'm sure they want jewelry. They definitely want origami jewelry.


AND ON THAT NOTE I WOULD LIKE TO TAKE A MOMENT TO BRAG. I am, as far as I could tell either by googling OR by searching on etsy, the ONLY PERSON who will make you earrings with more than one crane on them. They're BIRDS! Did seriously nobody else think of a flock? Man, now that I've cornered the market, I wish I could patent the idea. I think that's considered cheating in the art world. But I've been making them for a few years now, without ever realizing I was making something so unique, nobody else is doing it at all.

(Of course, maybe it's because my main materials are so light - the really, really nice handmade washi chiyogami paper is thin and lightweight, but the yuzen paper (not handmade or as expensive) is normal-to-really-thick paper thickness, and it would be harder to make flocks of. I've been using starburst wrappers, which are really thin, light paper, so I've had an advantage...to easily make a flock I have to either use the really cheap materials, or the really expensive ones. Now that's odd.)


Oh and also, advice says, post photographs everywhere. Facebook. Flickr. HERE. So I'm posting photographs. HERE.

Everybody (EVERYBODY) says "don't post all your listings at once. Space them throughout the day, because you'll get a bazillion times more exposure that way." It makes sense. If you only post once, but you post a bunch of stuff, if the people who happen to be on at that time don't like your stuff, they'll pass over it for stuff more up their alley in the just-posted box. So by posting every few hours, maybe, you can get all the crowd that shops on etsy at various times of the day, even if your post is only visible for a few seconds, let's be honest...those are important seconds.
SO, here are some photographs, and they are so new not even Etsy has seen most of them yet. Let me know if you like.


A gold wire-wrapped "apples and honeybees" set I made for a custom order.











A glittery green "bamboo forest" pair accented by swarovski crystals - so much green! - on wire-wrapped silver flowers.










A sodalite and green pair I've been thinking of privately as "the whole world round" and connecting with the earth...gemstone, metal, circles, green, it all fits, right? Add to that that the sodalite ironically looks like the sky, and I'm really happy with how these work.



A palm-leaf-inspired pair that fan out. Have I been focusing on green too much?

















And a pair that I love oh, so much...I've been getting all poetic about them, it's almost embarrassing. They have a lot of dark blue, and sodalite in general looks like the sky, no matter what shade it comes in...it just always manages to look like some form of weather, or clouds...and the dark, glittery blue shines like stars, and so does the star-flower wire-wrapping in sterling silver, and the matte beads are the spaces between the stars, right? So the dark blue glittery ribbons dangle down from the silver flower, just as the night sky hangs from stars. That's the way I think of it, anyway. Poetic, am I right? But I'm not even kidding, I love them dearly. I'm tempted to keep them, but I only ever wear one earring of a kind at a time. These ones are posted on etsy already, I could not resist