Determination

This Bluebell insisted on coming up even though the old leaf was in it's way. So he pushed right through it.

The leaf completely surrounds the stems of the bluebell.

I'm glad they found a way to work it out. Stubborn cooperation. There must be a profound lesson in here somewhere.

The Egg

Moustache Max holding the egg.



Max dipping the egg. Never mind those fancy egg holders. Fingers are best.

Showing us the green egg.

Balancing the egg? Flying egg?

Henry kissing the egg.

Speaking to the egg.



Not an egg...

Almost Easter

I woke up this morning to see that we sold my Loopy Bliss Aluminum Big Cross Pendant to someone in Belfast Ireland. I guess they don't have a lot of celtic crosses there. Or they have sold out of all of them. In any case, it was quite a lovely surprise to break our 1 day dry spell of no sales yesterday and I thought it pretty neat that I could make a celtic cross design that appealed to someone coming from the land of celtic crosses. It's like selling ice to eskimos. Perhaps with the weakened dollar it was just too good a bargain to pass up. Yay weak dollar!

Our slow down in sales on Etsy has allowed me a little bit of time to work on the long overdue wholesale order I really need to bring over to the First Alternative Food Co op in Corvallis. I was also able to take some new pictures and list this new design:

Long Stem Dark Ruby Red Earrings. I was quite pleased with the way the pictures came out. i took them indoors on my window sill on a mostly cloudy day. I kept waiting for the clouds to get in front of that bright harsh sun.

I was hesitant to do a version of the "all in one earwire that is the earring" motif that you see around a lot these days. But these big luscious red glass beads just seemed to work too well on that 18 gauge wire.

Our 14 year old wild cat Fidel has been getting into a lot of nasty fights lately. We think it is probably with our neighbors cat Patrick (named after Spongebob's friend) who is an unfixed male. We tend to wait out most of his war wounds but he developed a pussy absess on his face that could not be ignored. Especially when it started to leak. Ewwww. So we pulled out our old trusty Pet Taxi and squeezed him in and took him to the vet. We hadn't put the cat carrier away yet since Henry and Max were fascinated by the thing. They thought Fidel would like to play chess in there. Every time I passed by and saw it out of the coner of my eye I would have a moment of panic as I thought it looked like there was a pile of poop in there.

Nope, just chess pieces. Fidel apparently had no interest in playing chess . Nor does he seem to ever want to enter that thing again.Who can blame him him?

Happy almost Easter!

come all you cool trendy Moms

Swirly Flower Amethyst and Aventurine Pendant
This was a request by a good customer of ours and a darn good idea. It is the perfect match to our Swirly Flower Amethyst and Aventurine Earrings and Bracelet.

We were featured in the Hip Mama's Place today!
It's a new website that says "Hip Mama's Place-- where cool, trendy moms hang out!"
We love publicity.

Welcome spring! Happy Birthday Dad ,even though you don't read my blog.

New Red Flower Earrings

More fun with my czech glass beads and sterling silver wire!

Another lengthy boring name:

Spiraling Sterling Silver Leaf and Ruby Red Glass Flower Earrings

If anyone has some clever ideas for a better name please let me know. Really!

In the meantime we are busy, busy, busy filling Etsy orders and wholesale orders.

The custom silhouette pendant inquiries and orders seem to never end.

I am also trying to get a grip on all that needs to be done for starting at the Eugene Saturday Market again. The new season begins the first saturday in April. The display looks pretty shabby but I don't foresee anytime to spruce things up. Oh well.

Real Spring Flowers

These are our first daffodils of the year! We've been having amazing early spring weather here in western Oregon.


More evidence of spring. The iris shoots are coming up. Unfortuantely they rarely actually create more than a couple of flowers for us. It might have something to do with the fact that I do nothing to take care of them. My gardening theory is that if you can't make it on your own here then you best be moving on. I might occasionally break out the hose in the midst of a summer heat wave but then again, I may not. We are also seeing the grass starting to get too high. I have already heard the familiar hum of my diligent neighbors riding mower. damn him! I don't know how we'll have any time for all that mowing this year.

The dependable pretty purple primroses are out. They work well with my gardening theory.

Here is a very mature and serious Max doing some fishing in the water filled sand table. This boy is obsessed with fish!

No time for new products this week. We had an astounding weekend of sales this weekend and were even near the top of the top sellers list on etsytools.com on Sunday. It may be the Cookie magazine crowd coming by or just some good Etsy luck but we're not complaining. This February was our best selling month besides December in the past year.

Back to work. But first we need to eat those brownies I am burning.( My cooking techniques are somewhat similar to my gardening techniques.)

Spring Flowers and Books

I've been making more earrings with the new Czech glass beads I got. These are some Pretty Little Pink Flowers and Leaves Earrings. It was fun coming up with these new designs.I'm hoping I have time to make some pendants too. They make me feel like spring is in the air.

Happy Little Orange Flowers and Leaves Earrings. I mistakenly ordered these orange flower beads but I'm glad I did.

This weekend was the Annual Friends of the Library Book Sale.We got lots of great kids books including a bunch of fish related books which is Max's latest obsession. Henry loaded up on Clifford books which is kind of a snore for me but if it keeps him interested in reading I'm happy. I have to say that until I became a parent I never realized that you could read a book out loud and actually be thinking about 10 million other things at the same time. I guess I'll call it multi-tasking.

More fame and filth

We seem to be very busy these days. We got mentioned in a parenting magazine called "Cookie Magazine". (Thanks for noticing Mimi and Moe's Mom!)
Nick had done a special custom order for a very nice fellow of a silhouette of his daughter in silver. I put the bail on it and one of our chains. Well there was an article about Stuart and his wife and their lovely business.The Cookie people saw the pendant and loved it and put a little blurb on the bottom of page 38 with a picture of the pendant and our Etsy shop address and how this is one of their most special possessions. Nick posted a picture of one of the orders he just completed for a sihouette on his blog. We've been answering emails and Etsy conversations endlessly for days now. Our regular Etsy sales don't seem to have increased all that much from the exposure but it certainly can't hurt.But Nick is busy vectorizing profiles of lots of cute children and turning them into pendants.


This is Max looking very serious with his precious fishy and froggy blanket and juice on his spot on the couch- the essentials of his happiness.

Now he's happy.

Monday was my birthday. Max really got "into" the cake.Unfortunately I had some sort of stomach bug that day and needed to be home and close to the bathroom. I still managed to eat birthday cake. I have a cake problem that no stomach bug can stop.

Henry really loves his cat. Fidel isn't particularly thrilled but will take any attention he can get.

Henry devilishly hiding something.

This is what happens when you aren't paying attention and your 2 and 5 year olds get a hold of styrofoam. They deconstruct it into every tiny seed of foam that it can be. It gets everywhere and sticks to everything!

Here are my little helpers. Henry has the dustbuster and Max keeps insisting on dismantling the big vacuum cleaner.

It was a cleaning frenzy. Yet I still have the stuff showing up .This has added a new element of debris to our already super messy house. I surrender!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Henry came home from preschool today with a bag of Valentine's and some candy.It was at that moment that I panicked that I didn't even think to send Henry to school with Valentine's for every kid. What kind of a Mother am I? He had all these tacky pop culture little Valentines with stuff like the Backyardigans, Barbie,Power Rangers etc. They were signed by kids but then I looked closely and saw that some said "from Henry" and not in his handwriting. It was then that I realized that the school had provided all the Valentines and they had written them all out together today in school. I wasn't a failure as a Mother (at least in this instance.). Phew!


Then we opened the Valentine's from Grandma Fran and me and Nick. The gorging began.

Max spit out about half of it and said some was "gross".They were very generous and shared their chocolate with me.

Then we went outside and played in the garden. It was another one of the beautiful days in February that we often get. Mild and warm and sunny.

And just in case you thought computers were bad for your kids,...Max insisted on eating a carrot when we found this "In the Garden" cartoon on youtube. This child rarely eats a vegetable but here he is happily gnawing on a raw carrot because he was watching it over and over on this little video.

Happy Valentine's Day!

36 Dragonflies, Hoops and Loops

This is what 36 dragonfly pendants look like in case you were wondering. This is what I did this week (among other things of course.)I have dragonflies imbedded in my brain. I had a special order for these 36 dragonfly pendants. It didn't take as long as I thought it would ,which is a good thing.


Here is a design I came up with around Christmas: Sterling Silver Fancy Loop Hoop Earrings and I listed in our Etsy shop the other day.

This is the sterling silver version of our Long Loop Cross Pendant as requested by a customer. It was a good idea that I should have done a while ago. It sold within a few hours of listing it! I love that!

New stuff and old new stuff

I listed this new Groovy Flower Power Sterling Silver Pendant a few weeks ago but forgot to mention it. We had a lovely customer purchase our Groovy Flower Ornament during the Holidays and asked if we had a silver pendant. It was a great idea and so here it is. We have already sold quite a few. Our customers often have the best ideas!

These earrings are another customer inspired piece. I am working on a custom order for a sweet gal for her wedding party. She had some ideas for the earrings for the brides maids and herself and this is what I came up with:

Dancing Double Swirl Curl Sterling Silver Earrings

And here are some more new old things. These are our standard simple glass earrings. We cut a groove around the edges of the glass cab and then set the sterling silver wire in the groove. This was one of our first big designs that we started back in the late 80's that is completely influenced by the Peruvian earring styles that were hot back then. This is how we got our "groove on".We started cutting the groove on stone beads and then the glass craze began in the 90's so we caught on and now they seem to sell better than the stone ones.

Vermillion Red Shiny Glass Earrings


Light Blue Frosted Like Beach Glass Earrings

More colors will be coming soon to our collection.

Almost, kinda, sorta famous

We're featured on a cool website:
www.sofachip.com

The URL of the article is this: http://www.sofachip.com/2008/01/31/so-you-want-to-have-jewelry-like-carrie-charlotte-miranda-and-samantha/#more-319

As a TV addict and fan of "Sex in the City" it was a pleasant surprise to get the message this mroning form the writer of the site telling us we are one of the jewelers menioned. My Big Bold Cobalt Blue Simple Glass Pendant is mentioned as something Samantha would wear.

More flowers even though it's snowing

Well it's definitely not spring around here but I've been making more spring flower earrings using my new czech glass beads. Lots of people use these beads ,especially all over Etsy but I'm hoping to add my own "twist" to them. Get it? "twist"?
These earrings are a smaller simpler version of the pair I posted about in my last blog entry.
Single Stem Purple and Periodot Flowers and Swirls Earrings.

These are Pretty in Pink Little Loops and Flowers Earrings. They have a nice pastel, soft pretty feel about them. Heck , even I would wear them.

This is our sleepy little engineer who passed out with his hands on the geo trax train controls in the tweety bird engineers seat.

yesterday people liked us....

Top Seller! Yeah Baby!
Yesterday was crazy.It was like one of those days before Christmas with sales coming in all day. It began with one huge 12 item order and it just kept coming. We ended up as the fourth top seller for the day of non supplies. Here is the screen shot to prove it:

We actually sold more than the chart shows.We have no idea why we sold so much. We weren't in any treasuries or on the front page or in the gift guide and there didn't seem to be any significant recent blogs mentioning us. I think it has something to do with not selling anything the day before just so that we can confirm that life is perverse or at least business is unpredictable.


This is my newest design using some of my new czech glass beads. I call it Purple Vining Flowers and Tendrils Sterling Silver Earrings. How's that for a mouthful of earring?
I bought a whole bunch of various flowers and leaves and feel a really tacky gem tree creation in my future. I'll try to just stick to tasteful jewelry.


This is Max admiring Henry's smores snowman creation that he made at preschool.We love his school.