I'm back!

Well it's been a ridiculously long time since I blogged. Just busy and not that into it. Facebook just seems so much easier.(Give in to it all you reluctant facebookers. Join the herd. It's fun and easy and everyones doing it.)
I just got back from spending 4 days in Albuquerque with my parents while my Mom was going through surgery for Colon cancer. It went very well. They were able to do it all laparoscopically. She is strong tough lady and was just released from the hospital today. The surgery was on Monday!. She is expected to fully recover.
It was hard to leave my family. I had never been away from Henry before and he was initially very upset. But he resigned himself to it and bribery helped .Nothing like a bunch of new legos and wii games to get over Mom being away. Max took it like a man. Nick was super dad.
I may be a freak but I love airports and airplane travel. Yeah there are some scary, high anxiety moments but I still find it so amazing and exciting.I think the picture above is Mt Hood outside of Portland.

The Desert.

Approaching Albuquerque.

Mom and dad in their backyard (pre surgery).

Me and Mom squinting in the harsh bright sun.

The guest room/office I stayed in.Note the ancient PC with windows 98 on dial up and the half broken roller ball mouse they insist on using that drove me insane and tv with converter box. I was satellite dish deprived but did get to see 5 different religious channels and mexican soap operas.

My Dad is an arteest. That is one of my favorite paintings of his.

One of his statues in the back yard.

His sculpture garden on the side of their home.

I think it looks like he's giving the finger. He says it's just pointing.

Circus and pin

Life and the business have been busy which is great.I took the kids to the circus last week with our friends. They come to town once a year (the circus that is- not our friends)and the kids love it. It's quite the show.

And of course you have to have cotton candy.


This is my newest shawl / hair pin design.


Celtic Open Eye Aluminum Shawl Pin / Hair Pin or Brooch
I sold the first one today. Hooray!
We are also now selling our geeky nerdy jewelry at The Makers Market.

Henry's Apple Jewelry

Our son Henry saw our red glass marble pendants and said "You should put a leaf on it and make it an apple pendant." I poo pooed him but did it anyway just to please him and put it on our display and the Holiday Market last December. Well it sold! Then he begged me to make more and put them on Etsy. So I finally had time and the perfect photography weather and did it. These are Ruby Red Cherry Apple Glass Marble Earrings.

This is the Ruby Red Cherry Apple Glass Pendant.
I was thinking of Snow White's apple when I took the picture. So I posted about them on our facebook fanpage and we sold TWO in a day!
I hadn't even thought of the brilliant teacher's gift idea for them that our lovely and clever customers told us about. So now Henry get's a cut on very one that sells. He's quickly supplementing his allowance income.

New Shawl Pin

Just added this new design to our shop.

Circle With A Twist Aluminum Shawl Pin

New pictures of Kitty Pendant

Yesterday I had some time and the weather was perfect for taking pictures. So I finally took a couple of better photos of the Cute Kitty with Sterling Silver Ball of Yarn Pendant.

Happy Valentine's Day!

We took a hike with our friends today.It was a lovely mild day,cloudy but no rain in a place we've never been before.


A nice view of our town-Philomath.


Clouds are low.

Max running.

Lauren and Max study the big worm.

More low clouds.

Aidan, Henry and Max

New in our shop -Biohazard Sterling Silver Pendant

Groucho Max

Of all the toys he could chose from at the dollar store this was what he picked. He's quite the entertainer. He is also the most stubborn boy ever when it comes to pooping in the potty.He says even when he is a man he will not poop in the potty. Good thing he is so darn cute.

Yay- new widget and a new look!

Do things look a little different here? Just a little. I am on a great team -Full Time Etsy Crafters-
Check out our team blog
One of our teamies (Ileaiye) showed us the neat widget on the right here that let's you see all the cool stuff in our shop and buy from it.
Then Celeste of Crickets Creations made a step by step tutorial to make it even easier.
In order to put in that little widget I had to update my template so I hastily chose one from their choices and ta da- here I am with a new looking blog.
To me it is exciting. It's the little things.

New Design -Single piece pin

I've been trying to come up with original ideas for shawl or brooch pins that are one piece rather than the main piece with the second stick that goes through it. I've had a couple of customers ask about it because it is so easy to loose the stick pin part.


This is the new design -Celtic Twist Aluminum Bar Shawl Pin or Brooch



See how it works?

Motivated anyone?

It's been a while since I've been feeling motivated to blog. I've been on an exercise strike too. Perhaps the two are related.Probably not. I thought I'd try and come up with something a little valentine's-y so I reworked this heart design as a shawl pin. The photos just didn't really make it "pop" but here it is anyway. The
Spiral Love Heart Light Weight Aluminum Shawl Pin


By popular request Nick reworked the HTML head Super nerdy and geeky earrings to be lower case which is the more commonly used code these days. So of course I had to take new pictures too. Again, I'm not really thrilled with them but they will do. Somehow our stuff still seems to sell well on Etsy despite the mediocre pictures.
One of our favorite mottos is "the perfect is the enemy of the good enough." I'm sure I just mangled the exact quote but you get what I mean. Which is a perfect self referential example of the meaning of it. Wow- so deep this morning!
I have a new shawl pin design I'm working on with the stick integrated into the piece as a more tradional type brooch that I'm excited about and hope to get in the shop and show off here soon.
In the meantime I'm still working on restocking the shop of all the sold out items from Christmas. It's nice to have a long break until the Saturday Market starts again.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

My demented kids


Max acting goofy



Max digging into his stocking.

Henry was begging us for the Lego Power Miners Thunder Driller. He was a happy boy.

Holiday stuff

It's been a crazy busy holiday selling season for us. We are feeling very lucky and overwhelmingly busy. We finally got caught up with all the orders and packaging and things are starting to wind down a little. Tomorrow will be my last day selling at the Eugene Holiday Market.
We did manage to do some of the holiday stuff with the kids so that they don't just remember their parents working all the time during the holidays. We've been basically spoiling them everyday with whatever they want. Celebrating both Chanukah and Christmas kind of feeds into that.

Here is a sort of freaky picture of Max and Henry lighting the Chanukah candles.

Nick and Henry cut down one of our many spindly trees on our property for our Christmas tree.

Pathetic Plea

Our Celtic Loops Spiral Cross Ornament has been nominated in Etsy's Vote for your favorite ornament contest. I am so excited and happy to be nominated! So if you have a chance scoot on over to the site and vote for me! Pretty please with sugar on top?

This should be the link to the voting part of the site:

http://www.etsy.com/voter_list.php?ref=voter&room_id=80

2 new shawl pins

I had gotten a couple of requests for a Fle ur-De Lis design and I finally got around to coming up with a good one. It was tricky. This one has some more hammering involved. I also thought I needed to add more color to our photos so I have been playing around with different colored books to use as backgrounds in my pictures.

Spiraling Full Circle Aluminum Shawl Pin/ Hair Pin

This is another new shawl pin although it is a take off on a simple design I have used for pendants and earrings. It suddenly dawned on me that it would make a good shawl pin too.

I have a couple of other new additons to our shop that I'll show y'all later.

Things have been busy here. We had our Chanukah Menorah Ornament mentioned in the Etsy Finds mass email on October 19th that brought tons of visitors to our shop. I discovered that that ornament is a pain to make and is underpriced. But I made about 25 of them in 24 hours and we are still getting orders for them.

I am no longer selling outdoors at the Eugene Saturday Market but we are gearing up to start selling at the indoor Holiday Market in Eugene starting November 21st. It's going to be hectic!

Happy Halloween!

Henry,Aidan Lauren and Max

More fun with wire

I had a customer contact us with a picure of a design she loved and wanted to know if I could make it into a hair fork.
I loved the design and became obsessed with it over that weekend.
Here's what I came up with. It's now a regular item in our shop .
Celtic Double Entwined Heart Aluminum Double Hair Sticks/Hair Fork Pin


























I also made it into a shawl pin.
Entwined Hearts Celtic Knot Aluminum Shawl Pin/ Hair Pin
I'm planning to work it into a pendant design too and see what I can come up with in Sterling Silver. I'm also toying around with the idea of making all of our shawl pins in Sterling Silver
but the cost of silver is quite high now and I'm not sure I can get away with selling a more expensive pin.
But it's a thought...

















Here's another design recently added to the shop-Celtic Looping Crossed Knots Light Weight Aluminum Earrings

















And after numerous requests we now have the Groovy Flower Power Big Light Weight Aluminum Earrings in our shop too.
So that's what's new and exciting here. I have to admit that I find it easier to add new items and info on our facebook fanpage than on the blog. So come on over and be a fan if you aren't already http://www.facebook.com/NicholasandFelice
But I intend to keep up with the blog and realize there is a whole lot of people who don't waste their precious time on facebook. Hard to imagine :)