Each year Martha Stewart holds a competition for $10,000 ( and various other perks) for businesses who make their products in the U.S. and who encourage and work with other small companies in the U.S. They look for beautiful, inspiring and useful products. There are four key categories – crafts, design, food and our category, style!
We are proud to be a 2014 style nominee and can’t wait until voting begins on September 15! Please vote for us!
We’ve been prepping our storefront for a while now, and it’s pretty much ready to start selling our hand stamped jewelry and other personalized treasures. Well, it will never be ready, still so much to do! But at some point we have to just go for it. Customers have been coming in and giving us great feedback so far. It’s helpful to hear what people think and how happy they are that we are here!
I think I mentioned this before but I’m so excited about the cabinets I found on Craig’s List. It’s as if they were made for our shop. They fit in our space perfectly. They are vintage jewelry displays, once owned by a jeweler who retired and decided to let go of them. I hope he’s enjoying his retirement while I’m enjoying the cabinets! They even have working lights, such a bonus.
I will be doing another blog post on my hand stamped jewelry displays. I’ve had a fantastic time scouring the DIY blogs and Pins to find ideas on how to display everything. I love DIY and re-purposing anyway, so I have had a great time painting, nailing, hanging, hot gluing to my heart’s content. Have glue gun will travel!
We have the shop divided into themes – hand stamped jewelry and personalized jewelry, handwriting jewelry and a build-your-own necklace station. We call the build your own station “Mary’s Corner” after my friend Mary who often comes in to design her own necklaces she gives as gifts. It’s fun to see what people come up with!
If you have any ideas for us or know of good jewelry display ideas, please let me know! We’d love your feedback. Come visit us soon!
We are just about ready to officially open our storefront, though customers have been coming in already, which we love!
We have a little bit of cleanup to do and we have to install our divider that will divide the work area from the store area…we’re hoping to get that all settled this weekend so we can open next week. Then on to planning our gr and opening! Can’t wait to start talking with customers face-to-face and spending time in the store.
We’re also trying to work on a wood display idea we had…kind of funny in that I found some really great weathered wood in the neighborhood, only to find out it was claimed by someone else already. So I’ve been “scouring the streets” for some wood, and just today I saw my next door neighbor working on their new fence! Ah! Lots of nice, weathered wood for the taking. So that will be a fun little side project as well.
We’ll see how my woodworking skills pan out.
More photos to come!
We here in our studio have been playing around with lots of new materials and ideas this summer, and have decided that chunky is definitely the new black.
I’ve always loved substantial jewelry – not necessarily huge charms but materials that have substance, that you can feel when you hold them and wear them. This is why I’ve always, since day one of my business, used thicker metals for charms whenever possible.
Stamping on thicker charms just looks better, and keeps customers coming back for more quality hand stamped jewelry.
Our new “Chunky Resting Hearts Necklace” takes charm thickness a step further by being what can only be described as “chunky”, and beautiful of course! Jewelry like this can make a statement with or without personalization. The copper metal we use comes out in this gorgeous hue of orange-brown. You really have to see it in person to fully appreciate it, it is just so pretty.
The small silver heart is made of solid fine silver. Both hearts are handmade here in our California studio. Check out the video below to see for yourself how substantial and pretty these charms are!
