Mid June in Oregon

This is probably one of the prettiest times of year here.  We have a lovely field of

daisies that pops up.

Some sort of perenial bell flower I planted many years ago that comes up every year.

The beautiful foxgloves make their appearance.

Even our hidden garden art sculture seems to be enjoying it. This is the work of a

Eugene Saturday Market artist who moved back to Baltimore and needed someone

to take this off of his hands about 20 years ago. I wish I could remember his name.

The Royal Anne cherry tree in our front yard is just starting to come on. It’s a little

early this year, I assume because of our unusually dry warm spring. Let the gorging begin!

I’ve been working on some cherry jewelry ideas. Next week when it gets cloudy

again I’ll take some good pictures for putting the new cherry jewelry in our shop.

New Little Things

After numerous requests I have finally added the little “child sized” versions of

these popular pendants that we also sell together with the larger versions in the Mother

Child Sets. The above picture is the Little Celtic Heart Sterling Silver Wire Pendant .

This is the Little Loopy Celtic Cross Silver Wire Pendant .

Little Celtic Tree Sterling Silver Pendant

I also got some new amazonite beads in stock that are a little different color than

the older ones we used to have and sold out of so I took some new pictures and

put the pendant and earrings back in the shop. Yay!

A few more new things are coming soon!

Whooo made an owl pin?

I did and boy was that a tricky one! But here’s my owl pin. After lots of experimenting

I realized it needed to be made in a thinner gauge wire than I usually use for

aluminum pins. So it probably wouldn’t work well for a heavy shawl. It had been

requested many times and it was a fun challenge.

New stuff in the shop this week

It’s been a productive week. I was finally able to figure out how to use my new

little Canon Elf Power Shot  and get some good pictures of these new

Little Lilac
Cluster Purple Glass Flower Earrings.

I still need to work on it though. I’m too lazy

to get a real DSLR camera and learn how to really do this photography thing. So

my little point and shoot and photoshop is where I’m at.

We had a special request for a little sterling silver pendant version of the

Thor’s
Hammer Pendant.

So here it is.

I had a stroke of something-I wouldn’t go so far as to call it genius – and realized

I needed to hang a little heart from the right side of the Om symbol design in order

to get it to hang right. A perfect balance. This Om Symbol Ornament is the result.

Ommmmmm yoga inspired shawl pin

I started taking yoga classes again last year after a 10 year hiatus. I take it from

a lovely kind woman who has a sweet little cabin studio in the woods near where I live.

Her studio is adorned with yoga related nick nacks. My busy mind often ends up

looking at all the om symbols and thinking about how I can make it out of wire.

I just can’t help myself.

And this was the result. It was pretty tricky getting it to work with one piece of wire.

I’d like to make it as a pendant but I just can’t get it to hang straight. It will need

some sort of balancing bead dangling off the lower right loop and I haven’t come up

quite the right solution yet for that.

So for now I only offer the Om Aluminum Shawl Pin.

Change is at hand

This time of year we are usually starting to get stressed about getting

our Saturday Market booth out and display spruced up. But not this

year. After careful thought  and budget reviews and listening to the

inner whine and sometimes not so inner whine, we have decided to

take an official leave of absence from the Eugene Saturday Market

and Holiday Market.

We are grateful to the Saturday Market for giving us the opportunity for 22 years

(!!!!!!!) to grow our little jewelry business.  But it’s time for a sabbatical as my

Mom put it. We worked hard  and spent many many days in the bitter cold rain

and scalding heat, driving an hour each way to sell our stuff face to face with

our customers. Then Etsy came along almost 7 years ago and changed everything.

We have the option to return next year to our reserved booth spaces. But for now

we are savoring the freedom of enjoying the weekends and not getting up even

earlier than we do the rest of the week. I am so not a morning person.

  As we get older the knowledge that our time is precious becomes pounded into us. It became 

clear that this is the time to take a break from the weekend market lifestyle and enjoy

hanging with the kids and relaxing.

Good luck and best wishes for a great new selling season to all our friends at Saturday

Market. I hope our prime corner spot on the corner of 8th and west Park serves

the new booth holder well!

What’s new?

I added the new longer version of the Celtic Braid Hair Barrette to our shop.

Nick the took the picture of it in my hair. I am in the process of growing out my dyed

hair and growing in the natural gray color. (That will be a whole other blog post 

some time soon.) So for now the dark ends make a good contrast with the silver

color of the aluminum. It will be interesting to see how they show up when all

the grey is grown in. I may be needing a new model.

I also added the new nice and big Aluminum Celtic Knot Flower Swirl  Earrings

into the shop today.

This is them in my hands to give some size perspective.

And this is a the gratuitous cute fat kitty picture of our cat Mrs.CuteKitty. I don’t

know why she’s so fat. She doesn’t eat much that we give her. She just feasts on

rodents and the occasional bird all day long.

New design- Celtic Braid Shawl Pin or Hair Pin

I love the thrill of messing around with ideas, messing up a bunch of times and

coming up with something totally unexpected from the mistakes. That’s how I

ended up with this new design –The Celtic Braid Shawl Pin / Hair Pin

I’m usually at a loss for coming up with a good name for my designs so I asked my

genius friends who have become our virtual co- workers on our favorite Etsy Team-

The Full Time Etsy Crafters for some naming help and they instantly came up with

the Celtic Braid. They agreed it looks like a fern frond or vine of some sort too.

But I stuck with the Celtic Braid since it works so well with the overall Celtic theme

of so much of our shop and work.

I plan to add the smaller silver version as a pin and I have some earring ideas too.

Now to get it all done. …

New Celtic Swirl Flower Hair Fork / Shawl Pin in the shop-new twists on old designs

One of my favorite ways to come up with new designs is to take an old design and

figure out how I can change it into something else. This was one of Nick’s earliest

designs that has been very successful-the Celtic Swirly flower. We’ve probably

been making it for about

20 years as sterling silver earrings.

And now I have transformed into a fork design that can be used in  hair or shawls.

 

It also works as a shawl pin too.

I’ll be adding them into the shop as soon as I have time, as a new pair of

 big aluminum earrings. Stay tuned for more Celtic swirly flowers….

New Celtic Angel Heart Jewelry

 

Last holiday season I came up with a fresh new version of our angel ornament design.

It surprised me when it came out looking like a heart as well as an angel so I called it

the Celtic Angel Heart. It sold really well during the holidays. I got a lot of requests for the same design as jewelry

and shawl pins. So this past month I added those into our shop too.

The sterling silver Celtic Angel Heart Pendant.

The matching Sterling Silver Celtic Angel heart Earrings.

This is the Little Sterling Silver Celtic Angel Heart Shawl Pin. We also have the

 larger aluminum pin version in the shop too.

Getting back in the blogging groove and new stuff

 

I’m back on the blogging road after a detour into busytown and just-not-feeling-it sidestreet.

This is a picture I took one sunny morning in January on the road in front of our house.

I really love living here in Western Oregon where January and February brings mixes of glorious warm

sunny days and gloomy rainy stretches.

 

The holiday selling season was a big success and now I am in the catching up phase

of adding back in  things that we have been sold out of creating new stuff.

We had a special request to make a Thor’s Mjolnir Hammer shawl pin.It was a fun

challenge and triggered some new ideas.

This is the smaller silver version.

This is the larger aluminum Thor’s Hammer pin.

Our annual Muddy Creek Corn Maze day family fun

For many years now we have been going to the Muddy Creek Corn Maze.

I’ll be sad when the kids are too old to want to go. This might be my favorite family picture ever.

This one came out pretty good without Max the goofball in it.

Cute kids- Lauren, Henry and Max

Nick made a new friend. Or rather I made him stand next to it  so I could take the picture.

Children of the corn- Henry and Aidan.

Ahhh the Moo Train. Max was terrified and wanted me to ride with him but the

owner said it would be too heavy so he had to man up and go alone. He ended

up facing his fears and loving it and went a second time. The picture is of Henry

who had no fear,only excitement. And our friends the Mayfields are behind him.

Hark, I see a pumpkin.

The always cute Kai and lovely Mom Amy with Ryan and Nick on the wagon ride.

Max looking jolly.

Good times!

What’s been happening?

Lot’s of things. We painted the kids room a couple of weeks ago. It was long overdue.

I had forgotten how much I dislike painting.

We had to paint over Henry’s wall art from when he was little. So we took some

pictures to save it for posterity. The room is now a lovely “Emerald Coast” teal.

I had to bribe the kids to let me take pictures of them in Stephanie’s shirts for her website:

Sasquatch Designs

I took the kids to the Shrewsbury Renaissance Fair Last Saturday. It was a beautiful

setting with perfect weather.

Yet somehow the most interesting part for the kids was Ye Olde Port- a Potty.

I had to drag them away from the sink you pump with your foot after patiently waiting

for them to lose interest for about 15 minutes.

Nick is getting birthday punches from his boys before diving into his cheesecake.

I made him his annual birthday vegetarian sushi.

Henry’s first day of school as a fourth grader.

One of the more exciting things happening around here is the long awaited pouring

and construction of a humungous concrete back patio. It will have a little overhang

built too. It’s like a little slab of Brooklyn in my Oregon paradise.

There is lots of exciting things happening in our business too. We just sent off our

first shipment to “Made In Oregon” of our Little Glass Flower Earrings.

They will be in all 11 stores! We have other big news but until the deal is signed

and completely on I will keep it secret.