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.

I got new pliers, I got new pliers!

After our big successful holiday season we decided we needed to spend some of that hard earned money on some new tools. Of course Nick is always ready to buy some new tools but it took me a while to get with the plan. I've been really attached to my crappy old pliers that I've had for probably 15 years and I was raised by the cheapest parents on earth ( I mean frugal and clever Mom and Dad- really!)
So we broke out the Rio Grande catalogue and made some purchases (that can be put towards our softening our tax burden.)

These are the heavy duty big Swanstrom made in the USA round nose pliers.($56!-I could crap in my pants from spending that much money on a pair of pliers). I'll be using these on the big aluminum wire (when I remember I have them) for those large curves.

These are my old cutters. The ones on the left are the special heavy duty pair that Nick customized for me for the big aluminum wire. They work great and I will still use those exclusively for the aluminum.

These are the new cutters. On the left are the Swanstrom micro super flush cutters for a mere $37. (Sarcasm there from the cheapest woman on earth- me.) On the right are the Xuron micro shear flush cutters also made in the USA. They cost less ($18) than the Swanstrom and work fine but the tip doesn't come to as fine a point. My tiny fat man hands prefer the micro shears because they fit completely into the palm of my hand the way I like my pliers to be.

These are my pathetic old flat nose pliers. I don't even know what brand they are. The black handled ones on the left are my faves. The sad pair on the right with the really messed up handle were for when I misplaced my fave ones, which happens often on my crazy messy desk.

But these are the new glorious professional pliers. On far left are the Swanstrom micro chain nose, ($26)the Xuron in the middle and the extra fine needle chain nose Swanstrom($32) on the right.

They all do a fine job but my preference is for the swanstrom micro chain nose. Again, they fit perfectly into the palm of my hand and are light weight. They come to a nice point. You would think that the finer pointed tipped ones on the right would come in the micro shear handle size but instead the larger sized handle pair has the finer tip. The smaller micro pair have a nice small point to but it's not aa small as the larger handled ones. The Xuron are nice and thin nosed but don't come to a clean point. they have a slightly square tip.They also feel a little flimsier than the others. I guess that's why they cost less.

Here is a close up of the tips. In this picture the Swanstrom micro chain nose are on the far left and the swanstrom needle chain nose are in the middle.the Xuron chain nose are on the left. I realize now that we bought the Xurons from Thunderbird Jewelry Suppy, not Rio Grande.


I just got some new beads too that I will blog about in the future.

Now for some kid related stuff.

Max decided it was time to eat his nasty old gingerbread house that already didn't have any candy on it since he ate the candy before it even got onto the house. Henry, the nostalgiac horder will probably keep his in the gallery of old gingerbread houses and other miscellania from his childhood (next to the toilet seat he won't let us throw out because he "loves it"and the stickers he put on it two years ago) until he is an old man .

This is the view out our living room window.I was standing in front of it holding Max and he said "The tree looks like a dinosaur Mommy."

He's right.

Here's the close up-



See it now? He has his mouth open and has a hand with a finger pointing.The branches of the tree even look like the scales sticking up.

See it?

The kid's a genius I tell you...

Hanging out

Well the holidays are officially over but we are still doing a lot of hanging out. Especially since pre school doesn't start again for Henry until next week. We have been having a hard time getting out of the house. We all have an annoying cough that we pass back and forth and the kids continue to take turns waking us up every night. These days just getting to Home Depot in Corvallis is on par with scaling Mount Everest. Maybe it'a just us but having 2 3/4year old and 5 year old boys is exhausting.

It has been raining a lot(gee in Oregon? Who would have thunk it?) but this morning we woke up to snow. It is now slushy and mostly gone but it was lovely for a little while.

I spent a lot of time working on a new earring design that I am pretty happy with. All the rain forced me to try some new photographing locations and I discovered that the window in our bedroom works well.

This is the Falling Pearls and Swirls Earring. I kept debating between this photo and then one below for which should be the first Etsy listing picture.

I love the look of this on the vintage Lorna Doone book but it's a little busy for the first photo. I will probably switch it though just to see if it gets more views. What do you think?

These came out nicely too on the same book in the same window. This is my updated Swirly Flowers with Aventurine and Amethyst Earrings. I ordered new 4mm aventurine and the ones that arrived are this deeper darker color than the ones I had before so I needed to take new pictures.

Well back to work although I still can't get myself to really clean up this house.

Some Christmas morning photos....

Well after working our tired butts off with our busiest holiday jewelry selling season ever, Nick and I managed to pull off a successful Christmas for the kids in an attempt to make up for all the days we convinced them that it was good parenting for them to watch all the Spongebob they wanted while we worked .Max is admiring the little omelette maker that Santa (aka Grandma June) gave daddy while Henry debates whether to go to the bathroom or look at the presents.

The awesome "squishy " fish Aunt Betsy gave Max. He is obsessed with fish.

Again the Omelette maker is admired. Henry was amazed that it had a "model egg" on it.

Again the squishy fish. Max held that chocolate Santa all day long.

A good view of the mayhem. They loved Kent's politically incorrect nerf ball guns that he wisely bought both of them.

Weeee! Henry levitates with joy at the giant Hot Wheels racing track set that Santa got the whole family.

Henry's 5th Birthday!

This is the long overdue birthday blog entry. Henry turned 5 on November 30th, 2007. We started off the day with presents from family in the morning.

Ewww! Daddy's gag gift of broccoli.

Hahaha my dad is sooo funny. Good thing i got all this Thomas stuff.

Then later in the afternoon we had the traditional birthday party with friends.

Henry had been planning the musical chairs event for quite some time. We played pin the tail on the donkey too.

He also insisted on having a pinata. Luckily Safeway provides the muy authentico rainbow guitar pinata in the ethnic food aisle. This pinata comes with many colored strings hanging from it that the kids take turns pulling until the lucky one pulls out the cardboard opening releasing all the yummy candy we filled it with. No smashing with sticks on this modern day safe pinata. No Funniest Home Video episodes here with some adult getting their genitals mistakenly smashed by the blindfolded innocent child.

One of our happy and cute party goers- Lauren

The blowing out of the candles on the Thomas birthday cake. Again, Thank You Safeway for giving me another easy way out of this parenting responsibility. Henry had been saving the bowling ball candles and pins all year for this event.

mmmm cake with Max.

We are slowly coming out of the holiday sales blitz and brutal winter colds/sinus infection. More blogging to come.