Jigs and trains

This is the jig Nick made for me to make the sterling silver earwires I use on the big aluminum earrings. I needed to make earwires that are larger than the ones we use for all our other earrings because of the large diameter of the aluminum. I was making them by just bending the 20 gauge half hard wire around my fingers. This jig is somewhat quicker but more importantly allows me to make a consistent size earwire.

This is my stubby finger holding down the end of the wire that is still attached to the big coil of silver wire. This way we have no waste.

Snip...


Here they are on a finished product. These Big Chunky Chain Aluminum Earrings look really heavy but are amazingly light. I sold a couple of pair this week for the first time.Yippee

This is our Big Aluminum Treble Clef Pendant.

Brothers...

Henry wears this shirt almost everyday. He loves Thomas the Tank Engine and all things Thomas. It was traumatic week last week when they announced the recall of certain Thomas wooden trains and accessories that were painted in lead tainted red paint in China. We studied the pictures on the website and gathered up our two trains, a box car ,railroad crossing sign and stop sign and put it in the big bubble mailer (which luckily we have a lot of) and sent them back to the factory. It will take 6 to 8 weeks before they will send back replacements and a "free gift". Henry has all sorts of wonderful fantasies about what the free gift or "prize" as he calls it will be. I keep trying to remind him that it will probably be something he doesn't like or want so that he isn't disappointed. Every once in a while he still falls into despair when he realizes that another day has gone by and he still doesn't have his trains (as if he doesn't have 30 other ones to play with right here in his happy home.) I think the Thomas company needs to compensate parents across the world who have had to deal with this psychological trauma with more than a free gift.

I'm thinking an all expenses paid vacation in Hawaii would be fair compensation.

Fame,legos and wirework

Life has finally gotten back to normal busy instead of crazy busy. You can read all about our 15 minutes of internet fame on Nick's blog. Briefly, Nick's silly yet clever HTML Head earrings got picked up in a bunch of blogs and websites and were on the front page of Digg.com for about 24 hours. This resulted in a tremendous amount of sales in a very short amount of time. It has been very exciting and overwhelming but the fad has died down and we are now only selling a few a day. Which is great too.

Henry on his own designed these Lego earrings. He picked them out and told Nick precisely where he wanted them to be drilled so that they could be lego beads. He then took them to me and told me how he wanted them to be made into earrings. Then he told me to take pictures of them to sell on Etsy and to sell for $5 at Saturday Market.


He also designed this earring card for them to be displayed on.

Here is the desperate craftsman pleading for a sale. I did take them to the market and put them on our $6 earring board. They got lots of looks and laughs and comments. They didn't sell this week but I'm sure they will eventually. But then I realized that they would sell best as a pendant on our $5 pendant rack.So next week we'll make a bunch of lego pendants.

Another occupation of Henry's is farmer. He decided he wants this to be his Halloween costume and is practicing wearing it.

Max!

I got two recent requests for my Dragonfly wirework earrings to be made with blue beads. So these are them. I now sell them on Etsy and at the market.

This is another new design. Sterling Silver Spirals in a Circle earrings.

I also make these big in aluminum. They seem to do well in both sizes.
Sometimes.