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!

Finally Learned How to Add Authors to the Blog

Hey Everyone!

So, just in case you were wondering, the author of the last few posts was me (Gloria) and not my mom (Phyllis).  At first, it just said that the author of the posts was “pjjewelerydesign,” but I wanted the readers to be able to differentiate between the posts that I write and the posts that my mom writes.  I didn’t want any confusion when I write something about my mom…people might start thinking that my mom is writing about my grandmother, and that this jewelry-making team spans three generations.  Although, now that I think about it, that would be pretty cool!  We could change our name to “Two-Glorias-and-a-Phyllis Jewelry Design.”  The name doesn’t exactly roll of the tongue, but the concept is pretty cute, don’t you think?

So while the first three posts say that the author was “Phyllis,” they were actually written by me.  Hopefully, there will no longer be any confusion as to who’s writing to you guys. 😉

In other, off-topic jewelry related news, I pierced my heel yesterday.  Yeah.  I opened up my jewelery box, and a bunch of earrings fell out onto the floor.  I picked up most of them, but then I took a step forward and suddenly felt a sting in my heel.  It was a tiny little stud that I had missed, and it was all the way in my heel.   I was pretty surprised, since I’ve been barefoot running for the past few months, and the bottom of my foot is mostly callus at this point.  I couldn’t believe that a tiny little earring was actually able to break the skin.  While my little heel piercing was pretty cute (and unique), I decided to let it close up a few minutes after piercing it because I felt like it wasn’t really my style, you know?  Also, I like being able to run/walk without pain. 😛