Look Beyond Mirrors » jewelry

Beading Update

Catriona — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 18:42:10 +0000

I’ve uploaded some pictures and samples of work to a Photobucket account so that they’re available for people to see. I’m still tweaking descriptions and things a little bit as these are samples and not things which are for retail, but I’m going to offer a sort of “build it yoruself” option on some of the jewlery and figured it would be a good idea for people to be able to see what sort of beads I have available for that.

So, if you go to http://s262.photobucket.com/albumes/ii99/lookbeyond/ you can see the beads I have available and some of the types of pieces I’ve made for family and friends and as practice pieces. I didn’t realize how many beads I’ve been able to acquire in such a short space of time.

The hard thing right now is branching out a bit. It’s easy for me to buy beads because I think they’re pretty but I have to look beyond my tastes also and get in more colors which are things that I might not look at initially but that other people would find wonderful.

New gemstones

Catriona — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 01:49:18 +0000

I’m very excited because a shipment of stones and boxes I ordered came in sooner than I expected. I needed to order gift boxes to ship my jewelry items in and while I was browsing Jewelry Supply I noticed they were having a sale on some of their semi-precious stones, so I ordered some of those as well to get the order up to allotment, rather than ordering 600 boxes that I might never use.

So now I have tiger’s eye, amethyst, carnelian and non-magnetic hematite to add to the rose quartz, moon stone, smoky quartz, garnet and magnetic hematite beads and chips that I can make items with.

I’ll have to post some pictures so that it’s easier for people to see what sorts of things they can have on their necklaces, earrings and bracelets.

I also made some connections with a small local bead shop on Wednesday. They have classes and the lady who runs the place is very nice. So hopefully I’ll be able to go to her for some additional pointers some time in the near future. She has a child who is about the same age as my son so she understands the perils of children and finding “time away” so said that she can coordinate with me if I can’t make it to the specific class.

That’s the sort of personal touch I hope that I can give with my business too.

Selling Update

Catriona — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 04:26:58 +0000

I’m in the process of setting up an Etsy store, given the encouragement to sell the earrings and things that I’m working on. Right now I’m just browsing around etsy and doing some rudimentary things so that I can be sure I understand the process.

Etsy’s rates are a lot more reasonable than setting up an eBay store, 3.75 percent compared to 8.75% off transaction price and a 20 cent insertion fee for four months instead of $1 minimum insertion fee for only a few days.

More on this as it progresses. Right now I’m trying to wrangle Photoshop onto the laptop but it’s uncooperative and looking for tips on ways to take better pictures of my jewelry items.

The earrings…

Catriona — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:26:07 +0000

For those who are curious. The earrings on the left of this picture are the ones that prompted the post about stones that I wrote the other day. They have all of the stones in them that I was talking about in that entry. The other earrings just have hematite in them. I’m not ever going to be able to make anything like mens gold watches, or anything remotely that fancy, but I’m very happy with the way things are progressing. In general I can make a pair of earrings now in less than an hour, provided I don’t discover that the stones are magnetic again so they keep sticking to my wirecutters…