Time is ticking away...!

It's been a good 10 days since I last wrote on here. In my defense, it is Easter break and my three school-age kids are all home. I've also been making up new jewellery destined for my amazon store and as it's all silver - and as I live in the UK - I find it far mor sensible to make up a fair amount as I have to send it off to be hallmarked at a British government assay office. Speaking of which, when they received my order, one of the ladies who worked there rang me up to ask how I'd feel about her taking a bracelet and sending the cash back with the rest of my hallmarking. Given the thousands and thousands of pieces of jewellery which go through my assay office every week, I was immensely flattered.

This is the coveted bracelet, in Sterling silver with freshwater pearls, amethyst and Swarovski crystal. I love the imperfections you get in dyed freshwater pearls - to me they really add a taste of 'unique'. They are rather lovely and should hit my amazon store in a couple of weeks (we have 3 public holidays in the next week, including today so things aren't moving quite so fast as they usually would!)

 

 I also spent a couple of DAYS sorting our all my beads and focals into fabby compartmented storage boxes. I did have them sorted by colour or type before - so all my blue gemstone beads were dumped in one box, all my pearls were dumped in one box and so forth but now I can see exactly what I've got. I am not the most organized of people so sorting through everything felt like a major achievement. I reduced the space used for storing my jewellery-making stuff drastically and also weeded out all the redundancy in my stock-keeping area, freeing up some shelves and storage boxes for a large shipment of pretty lampwork beads I expect to arrive soon - they were ordered about a month ago and I always ask the manufacturer to take extra care with making sure they're kiln-annealed properly so the lampwork doesn't break - this means my goods take a little longer to arrive but they're better made than might be the case if I didn't specificy my need for high quality.

While sorting through my beads, I found some awesome petrified wood beads (essentially, fossilised wood) and thought it was high time I made something with them. This necklace, and it's brothers were the result.

It's pretty and stylistically, very me. I love the rich colours of the pearls coupled with the freeform slabs of petrified wood. I made three of these and still haven't decided whether to steal one.

Finally, remember the Vintaj challenge I entered with my pretty Woodland Blush necklace? I came in 4th, which I was fairly ecstatic with given the quality of design talent featured! I am probably not going to find time to enter the next one but hopefully subsequent ones can be scheduled in.

Finally, tomorrow I have a craft fair. It's a while (as in months) since I've done one - I usually prefer not to do them as the time involved in sorting stuff, spending the day away, and unsorting stuff on my return isn't usually worth it for the return, given the time lost on my regular work schedule but I was asked to go along as a favour to the organiser (my sister!). So today I'm pretty much dedicating to sorting out stock and pricing for that.

Take care!

Stephie