Updates on Silver
Silver is a fabulous material with an inner glow and outer shimmer. Once valued as highly as gold, it has become an affordable precious metal without losing any of its beauty or marvel. It is very rarely used in an unalloyed form because of its softness but for the longest time its most common alloy partners were nickel and copper. Both of these metals are comparatively often reactive with human skin and, worse, increase silver’s already strong propensity to tarnish when exposed to light and air. I don’t know what took so long, but finally, in the 1990s someone, Peter Johns of the School of Art and Design (Middlesex University in the UK), devised a sterling silver allo

Moving On to the Next Big Thing
“Dreams and Delights” took place on Wednesday as planned. If I was a superstitious person I’d think that the lovely, sunny weather happened because we planned a snow date. In any case, the event attracted a steady stream of visitors. Wow. What’s next? Well, Black Friday through Cyber Monday I and a large number of other etsy shop owners are hosting some specials. Mine is 20% off all earrings. Something to thank my customers and inspire the economy to recover already. That, however, is not my next big thing. I have plans to completely redesign and recode my website. I’ve been planning on doing so for quite some time, from rewriting my artist statement

Dreams and Delights Countdown
Next week at this time I will be packing up after a successful afternoon, early evening hybrid Open Studio, Exhibition, and Sale. The complimentary food and drinks will be gone. A lot of guests will be on their way home with their finds that they have purchased or ordered. My goal is to create a recurring pre-holiday-craziness event that does indeed delight the senses and gift an afternoon of relaxation and enjoyment for everyone who comes. Maybe someday it will be a fixture, an artist and artisan event that everyone looks forward to. For my first experience organizing something, I think it’s going well. I’ve got two other artisans (Jessica Hazan, The Soup Gir

Artistic Promotion, Work in Progress
Why am I not panicking? Is it because instead of waiting til the last minute I have been working on signing up fellow artists and artisans, planning the promotional aspects, writing, drawing, ordering, creating? Why yes, I think that’s it. I’ve decided that I really do not enjoy the whole thing of Press Releases (writing them, sending them – which I still have to do). But if I can plan things early enough everything else seems a lot less intimidating. It’s not easy to toot one’s own horn when one has been brought up with lessons that encourage the opposite behavior. When I was a child I was constantly admonished to be modest about my talents; that it

October’s Opals and Tourmalines Part II
Last week it was all opals. This week we will take a gander at luscious pink tourmalines. Tourmaline is not a single mineral in many colors but rather a group of minerals – in many colors. Pink tourmaline is, specifically, elbaite with a chemical composition that is Sodium Lithium Aluminum Boro-Silicate Hydroxide. And… it also comes in red, green, blue, orange and yellow. (with their own names even if they are, still, elbaites). Elbaites are very popular as jewelry components and specimens for they are an especially beautiful member of the tourmaline group.