New Home Decor Pieces

I made my first soap/trinket dish for a housewarming gift for some friends.  Their home decor is in silver, grey and black so decided to go with a leaf pattern in those shades.  This was actually my first prototype and I love how the design worked out and plan to make more in different styles.

I hadn't made any candle collars in a while but finally got around to finishing a new set in the chandelier style for a wedding gift.  Their home decor colors were similar to our friends so went with the same leaf pattern.

Christmas Dreamin

I finally did it!  I ordered the Dream Machine for an early Christmas present to myself. 

I had a lot of pain in my shoulder for some time now and after checking with my doctor he told me I had tendinitis in my shoulder rotator cuff.  He said the only way to help it was to stop cranking my machine.


I have a wonderful Atlas 180 with modified blades for easy cleaning but I have not found a motor powerful enough for the amount of clay that I use.  I am looking forward to this new machine with it's heavy duty motor.  My claymate hopes it can crank out my clay without making me so cranky! lol!


I will let you know when it arrives and how it turns out....

Tiger Print Buttons

We love to see what others have created using our tutorials, beads or buttons.  This is a photo someone sent us of a beautiful neck warmer scarf they made using our round tiger print buttons.  

We have more tiger print as well as other animal print buttons in our Etsy Shop and ArtFire Studio.

Christmas Show in Westwold

Our second Christmas show for the year was yesterday in the little town of Westwold.  We thoroughly enjoyed the country setting with home baked pies, Christmas decorations and music and even a short flurry of snow outside for a festive atmosphere.

We have been going with a more festive theme in our displays this year adding touches of metallic red and silver.  Our set-up here at this show was similar to our last one but more compact since we had less space. The main idea is to utilize the area in the best way possible without it looking too cluttered.  The other most important thing we have found is to have good lighting which really brightens up everything and shows off all the true colors.

We set up a separate display for our shawl/scarf/hair pins as  we feel they deserve their own space.  I happened to have this white sweater that doesn't look so good on me to wear but makes an excellent backdrop and prop to attach and show off the shawl pins.

How to Make Quick & Easy Earring Stands for Christmas

We wanted some cool stands to show off our earrings on cards at our Christmas shows and had an idea as to what we wanted.  I planned to make some from clay but our time was limited with more pressing orders to fill instead so I came up with a quick and easy way that was also inexpensive.  It involved a trip to a dollar/discount store where I found some photo/name card holders.

 

Unfortunately they only had ones in a wedding theme which did not fit in with our jewelry display so I improvised and covered them up like this:


I found some gorgeous metallic laser gift wrap in red which happened to be silver on the opposite side to wrap the card holders in.

The name card holder was attached to a card with a metallic silver twist tie.  If yours has the same, you can save them and use them like I did or use ribbon of your choice.

Cut circle shapes from your gift wrap using pinking shears or fancy scrap booking cutters.  I used a bowl to draw the circles out that was just the right size.

I didn't want the top of the card holder to show so I used a scrap piece of the same paper to wrap the upper part.  I kept in mind as to what side of the gift wrap I was going to use.  If the silver was showing on the outside for instance, I would cover the top part of the holder in red to match with the inside of the gift wrap which would be red.

Now center the card holder in the gift wrap circle you cut out and bring it up to create a nice "package".

Your place card holder might be a different shape than what I have here so you may have to play around a bit to see what works best but these ones had an indent towards the bottom so I used the metallic silver twist tie to hold the gift wrap in place.  A pretty ribbon would have worked nicely as well.

As you can see we made a few of them with some silver showing on the outside and others with red.

Here we used them in our last show and they worked very well for us as we could display our earrings next to any other jewelry pieces that matched.

Our next show is this Saturday in Westwold which we are looking forward to.  Our display will be a little different  again as we try to customize it to each show and the type of space we have.  We will share on that after with more pics.

Finished Our First Show for the Christmas Season

Our first Christmas show was yesterday at the Kamloops Craft-a-fair.  It was a very busy and successful show and great start for the season.  Our booth set-up was a little different again this year with some new display props added.  We used all of our new "hand" displays as well as some framed photos of our niece modeling our jewelry.  Seeing the pieces on an actual person must have helped as we sold more of these "modeled" pieces than any other.

We also made these little stands to show off our earrings.  I planned to make some from clay but had too many things to do and too little time so I improvised with these.  I will show you in our next blog post how you can make your own.

When Wendy Meets Julie

Ever since I took Julie Picarello's workshop 2 years ago, I cannot stop playing with her mokume technique and creating all sorts of lizard tails.  The same goes with Wendy Orlowski's CaBezels.  So what happens when you combine the two?  You can come up with something like this -- my new Lizard CaBezel Collar Necklace.

I used Wendy's latest CaBezel (3 Fab Focals "Two"), to create the Bezel and cabochon with some mokume using Julie's technique.  I now feel some more new designs coming on and can't wait to put them into clay!