The Santa Monica Gem and Jewelry Show

One of the funnest things about designing jewelry is going to Gem and Jewelry shows.  These shows are amazing!  They travel around the country with hundreds of vendors, and these vendors are selling a little bit of everything: from basic jewelry findings (posts, wires, ect.), to ready-made jewelry, to purses and scarves.   Anyone is allowed into these shows, but people with wholesale jewelry licences have access to more of the vendor’s products at wholesale prices.

My mom and I like to go to these shows at least a few times every year because we can find a very wide variety of jewelry components that we wouldn’t be able to find in our local jewelry stores.   Many of the vendors sell interesting and unique beads, charms, clasps, posts and wires, and just wandering through all of the tables is a great way to come up with new ideas for jewelry.

We bought these tree charms at a Gem and Jewelry show last year..aren't these earrings cute?

This weekend, my mom and I went to the Santa Monica Gem and Jewelry Show looking for a few specific items: earring components, sturdy clasps, and an ear shaped mannequin.  We found a lot of earring components, including several very unique charms that we are going to use to make some cute, but inexpensive, earrings.  We also found some interesting silver toggle clasps for my mom’s testimony bracelets.   While we did find a mannequin, it was a hand shaped one (for bracelets) instead of an ear shaped one (for earrings and ear cuffs).  We had a time limit, so we were only able to stay at the show for about three hours, but we were pretty satisfied with the products that we bought.

The long and short of this is that we will soon have more earrings and bracelets available online!  While we have a couple of very pretty mannequins that we have been using for our some of our earrings and necklaces, we are still searching for something to model our ear cuffs on.  The ear cuffs won’t really fit on the hard mannequin ear, and they need to be put on something a little bit more flexible.  At some point, though, we are going to find some way to photograph the ear cuffs (I might just have to model them on my own ears, lol), and then we’ll post the pictures on the website.

Talk to you guys later!