If I Had a Nickel...

Today's Silver Price: $30.21/t.oz.

I've been looking at some nickel alloy wire on Rio Grande's website. The wire is 65% copper, 17% zinc, 18% nickel. It has a silver-tone finish. It comes in a 200 ft spool for $27.00. They also sell nickel jump rings which should work well with the wire- I don't want to mix metals too much, I'm not ready for that! LOL.

One of the advantages to using this wire over silver-plated or silver-filled is that there is not a different metal at the core of the wire which would show on the wire ends. If I were using a silver-plated wire I would have to have  a way to hide the ends of the wire to not show the brass or copper core.

A disadvantage would be that this particular wire only comes in dead-soft. I prefer to work with half-hard wire as it is more rigid. I am a little concerned about the wire holding its shape in jewelry designs. However wire is supposed to be come harder as you work with it (and becomes most hard when hammered).

I think I will give this wire a try- you can't beat the price! I'm going to try some linked hearts necklaces and bracelets and see if I can come up with some other linked shapes. Maybe Celtic knots? I have to make some prototypes out of craft wire to see what the designs will look like.

So now I can say... if I had a nickel for every time I've heard that... I'd make necklaces!

Show and Tell: Photography Critique

Today's Silver Price: $28.90/t.oz.

I think my photography skills are improving. The pictures I am taking of my jewelry now are so much better than the pictures I was taking when I first started. I think the light tent has been a big factor in getting better shots, but also just the experience of having taken so many photos that I now know how to get a great pic of a bracelet or a pair of earrings. In the beginning I was taking 10 to 20 photos of each piece, which I would then have to narrow down to five pictures to post on my Etsy page. Now I know how to get the good shots, so I may end up only taking five pictures!

I was particularly impressed with my latest round of earring pictures. I think I may be getting better pictures because I am using more interesting backgrounds. It's tricky to find backgrounds (in my case I use scrapbook paper) that is visually interesting but does not overpower the jewelry. I am getting good results using papers that have blurry or faint images that compliment the jewelry and are not too distracting. I am also trying to use the tripod more, even though I get impatient setting up the shot. I need to allow myself enough time to take good photos, and not just rush through the process to get it done.

I'm pretty satisfied now with the pictures I've been posting on Etsy. I think they are attractive and eye catching and much more dynamic than my older pics. Hopefully over time my pictures will continue to improve and help to boost my sales!

Debriefing

Today's Silver Price: $32.00/t.oz.

Level of success? My success was moderate this weekend. I did sell a lot of items, but unfortunately I won't be quitting my day job... yet.

This past Saturday's event was a craft fair at a local high school. Quote of the day: "Oh, I knew a girl that made jewelry but it was crap. Yours is really nice!" LOL. I was also asked twice if I go to school there. Mmmmm no, but thanks. I guess I should be happy that I can pass for 15 years younger than my real age!

Anyway, this craft fair was not so great. The vendor next to me said that the fair the school holds in November is better attended. Dammit. I made a little more than my table fee, which is to say I didn't make much profit. AT LEAST I made that table fee. It's a sad day when you lose money doing a craft fair (which I have).

Sunday's event was much more successful. A friend of mine held a vendor party in her backyard. It always helps when the customers are a bit liquored up... haha! The best thing about this event was there was no vendor fee, so everything I made was profit. I sold several bracelets, several rings and a few pairs of earrings. I found it very interesting to learn that what sells at one event will not necessarily sell at another event. Remember those dangle earrings I told you about? Didn't sell one pair this weekend. I was quite surprised.

Last night and tonight I've been posting my leftovers on my Etsy site. I've given my card out to a few ladies at work so I'm hoping I'll start getting more activity on the site.

That's all for now. I'm quite tired after not really having a weekend, so I'm off to bed early tonight!

Getting Ready; Wine Bottles Revisited; Hammers and Anvils

Today's Silver Price: $31.96/t.oz.

Getting Ready!

I received a shipment  yesterday from Fire Mountain Gems- 18 different colors of 6mm round glass beads! I immediately started making bracelets and before I knew it four hours had gone by, lol. It was a very productive evening!

I have two events this weekend. One is a holiday craft/vendor fair at a local high school. I've done a fair there previously with not much success. However this time I will return with a much larger inventory and better displays. I think I am going to stick with hanging my earrings on the window screens. It's more attractive, and so what if it takes longer to present them to the customer? I don't think I'll be that swamped... but you never know!

On Sunday a friend of mine is holding a holiday boutique party at her home. She is having Avon, Tupperware, myself and some other vendors. Pretty sweet idea... maybe she will become a vendor fair promoter in the future.

I haven't worked on any paintings, I have focused my energy on jewelry alone. Trying to focus on that 20% effort which should lead to 80% revenue. I may over the next few days work on a few watercolors already in progress, but I don't think I'll be creating anything new.

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Wine Bottles Revisited

I tried breaking wine bottles again into pieces I could use for jewelry. I was able to break the bottles this time, I just had to use more force. I had an idea to use different colored pieces to create glass snowflake ornaments but I had trouble getting the pieces into the shapes I wanted. I broke the bottles inside of two plastic bags. Then I tried grinding the edges down with a Dremel grinding stone to change the shape, but that did not work very well. I then used a cutting wheel on the Dremel. I found that if I scored a line in the glass piece with the cutting wheel, I could then use a pliers to break off the excess. I seem to remember a video I saw once of a stained glass artisan doing exactly that... my brain must have stored those images deep in the library of my head.

The whole thing was  very slow and tedious and might be too ambitious of a project. I might just not have the right Dremel bits. I think next I'll see if I am able to drill holes through the glass pieces so that they could be used in jewelry.

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Hammers and Anvils

In the spring I'm hoping to purchase some hammers and anvils so I can be a rockstar like this guy. I also want to learn how to solder so I can create more complex pieces. And I want to get a kiln and try out metal clay (clay that when fired burns away to leave metal)... and I want to get a jewelry tumbler...  So much to do, so little time!

Consignment Shops and Baseball Bats

Today's Silver Price: $34.79/t.oz

Consignment Shops

People are always telling me that I should sell my jewelry in consignment shops. My immediate reaction is always 'Hell No!' Just this morning someone told me that a friend of theirs had opened a consignment shop in the area and I could contact her to sell my jewelry. Here's how it would work. I make an agreement with a shop owner in which they will sell my jewelry in their store, and they keep a percentage of the sale. I trust that the shop owner will take good care of my handmade merchandise and make some effort to sell it. Now I'm not sure of the details of these kinds of agreements such as what percentage of the sale they keep, I suppose that depends on the arrangement.

From what I have read consignment shops can be a very bad choice.

In his book Philip Kadubec describes how he and his wife made an agreement with a consignment shop to sell their handmade baskets. They set up the baskets in the shop's window display and left the store with high hopes. When they returned at a later date they found that their baskets had been moved- placed under a table and out of view. That's no way to sell a product! Once you leave your product in someone else's shop you have no control over how and where it is displayed.

One of my objections to consignment is that I try to keep my prices as low as possible in order to attract buyers, but at the same time make a decent profit. If I were to give a percentage of my sale to someone else it wouldn't be worth it. I would have to raise my prices.

Also, I have always been terrible at delegating responsibility. So how could I trust someone else (a stranger, by the way) to sell my product? They didn't make it, they have no love for it, and if it doesn't sell it's no loss for them. For now I will stay away from consignment arrangements because it just doesn't feel right for me. Maybe in the future I will revisit the idea but for now I will continue to respectfully decline the suggestion.

Baseball Bats

This past Friday I was sitting in my car on my lunch break thinking about cuff bracelets (this is how my mind works- I daydream about jewelry). I found this video last week in which the artist makes a cuff bracelet out of a strip of 16 gauge sterling silver. He simply bends and then hammers the silver around a mandrel and forms a bracelet. Rio Grande sells a great selection of plain and patterned wire that can easily be made into cuff bracelets using a bracelet mandrel. A bracelet mandrel is a cylindrical object (usually steel) around which metal can be bent or wrapped in order to form a bracelet. As I mentioned last week, I do not have a bracelet mandrel, and one would cost about $30 or $40 to purchase.

I thought about what other objects I could possibly find that are similar to a mandrel and could be used for shaping cuff bracelets. I remembered I have an aluminum baseball bat in the back of my Jeep (a girl can never be too careful) and realized it was quite similar to a mandrel. I pulled the bat out of the back and found it was a pretty good size for wrapping a bracelet around. Aaaaaand... makeshift mandrel? Check!

I'm psyched out of my mind about it! I think cuff bracelets will become a large part of my jewelry collection in the very near future.