TribeBlog

We’ve restocked several products that we know many of you are waiting on, and those items are listed below. Click on the product photo to visit that product’s page and see sizing and pricing.

We’ve also created a considerable number of brand new products – both new designs as well as several new mixed-media inlay pieces. First, we’ll show the stocked products for which there are more than one set in each size. Click on the product to view that page for sizing and pricing.

Below we have shown the products that are limited stock or one of a kind. If these links dead-end, it means that product has been purchased. Click on the product to view that page for sizing and pricing.

For the full run-down on all of the latest products that we’ve added, visit the New Products section of our website. We are constantly adding new stock and one of a kind or short run items.

Lastly, we wanted to mention that we are starting to change up the way we do some of our carved items. We have started to carve our aztec flowers, koi, sugar skulls and other items as carved wood cabochons which we can set into silver or gold and inlay into anything (the same wood, other woods, stone, carved pieces, etc). This will give us much more modularity because some materials are not suitable for carving the designs into for solid plugs. It allows us to avoid stocking so much jewelry, and instead we can create exactly what you’d like in a specific size. Because all of the inlays will be hardware set without the use of glues or adhesives, your jewelry should last your lifetime, possibly longer with proper care.

We recently had an opportunity to reevaluate our location and our lease, and we decided that we could become more efficient and better serve not just our local customers but all of our customers by rethinking how our space is laid out. We decided to start looking for a new space, and found a beautiful location just a few blocks from our old spot that is a new perfect home for Onetribe. It will allow us to set up our workshop more efficiently and better our order production and fulfillment workflow, while being a more usable space for our local walk-in customers. We have always had the goal of expanding our museum collection and reference library and having more hands-on workshops and talks about jewelry production, materials and anthropology, and our new space will enable us to do this with more flexibility.

Our new showroom/workshop address is as follows:

Please do note that our mailing address, for the sake of consistency and security, is still our Post Office box:

We will post photographs of our new workshop and showroom areas as we finish setting everything up. Here’s the space as it sat before we started moving.

Good things are coming!

As part of our mission to help educate the public on the history of body modification, we are incorporating into our new website (which will launch later in the autumn) a database of museums worldwide which offer exhibits or pieces in their permanent collections related to body modification. Our goal is to provide a means for people to find out exactly where to go to view exhibitions of specific cultures or styles of jewelry.

We are asking our customers to consider visiting their local museums and documenting the collections on a short two page form to be submitted to us for inclusion in the database. We will accept submissions for establishments worldwide, as long as the submission is either provided in English or provided in your native language with English translation.

We’d be delighted to see some very thorough submissions with photographs and detailed descriptions of the collection. In exchange for your effort we are prepared to offer up to $10USD in store credit per museum submission to help with your admission cost. You get to see some amazing things and learn, you help us out by growing our database with museums we may not be physically able to visit, but most importantly you will help everyone interested in body modification gain greater access to educational information that might otherwise be difficult to find. We are hoping that with our combined communal efforts we will be able to establish a considerable list of collections for people to visit as they travel.

You can download the form, available in PDF format by clicking on this link. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

We’ve been busy working through our custom queue and we’d like to showcase some of the beautiful custom projects to come out of our workshop recently.

Beautiful gemmy Virginia amazonite pyramid faced plugs in 00g/9.2mm with 3/4″ / 19mm faces. This is a very fragile material and these were very tricky to make but turned out wonderful.

Here is our signature pinwheel flower design carved in black jadeite and inlaid with 6mm gem quality Idaho opals. The inlays are wrapped in silver bezels and the stones are riveted together with hardware – we do not use glue in our fine stone inlay projects.

This was a very intensive project involving several artists from our team. Custom drawings, which the customer approved, followed by wood carving, stone carving and then metal work. The sugar skull plugs carved in ebony and have both oval faces and an oval wearing surface in 32mm. The eyes are gem grade amethyst meticulously hand carved as 8mm wide flowers, each with a hidden metal setting and rivet securing the stones to the wood. As with all of our high end mixed-media projects, these pieces involve only the finest materials and traditional jewelry settings, with no glues used.

These very special pieces were a pleasure to work on. These are 3″ Narra plugs with traditional African clay lip plates carved down to serve as unique inlays. The Narra plugs were carved with a specific bowl angle to the faces which allowed us to, with a very large hidden silver setting, bezel set these pieces floating over the edge of the wood so that the very fragile clay edge makes no contact with the plug, and in fact hovers over the surface of the wood, casting a shadow that showcases the lip plates as if they were hanging in a display.

We have been the first company to bring several materials to the world of body jewelry, including this very rare ammolite material. Ammolite is the fossilized iridescent material from ancient ammonite shells. It is one of the rarest gemstones on earth, occurring in gem quality in one or two places worldwide. The material is extremely fragile and very thin – fractions of a millimeter – which requires very careful excavation and handling. As such, we set these pieces as triplets, which are composed of a layer of ammolite material backed with a slate base and protected by an optical quartz cap. These beautiful cabochons are set into 5/8″ ebony plugs with a silver hardware setting.

Speaking of unique materials, you won’t see this anywhere else. These are 35 million year old botanical fossils (a fern variety) set with a hidden silver setting and rivet into Narra wood.

We hope you’ve enjoyed the eyecandy!

If you’re reading this blog entry, we’d like to offer you a little discount as a thanks. We’ve just added several great new products – some stocked items, some made-to-order pieces and a few unique pairs. Use coupon code ‘juneblogreader‘ for the rest of the month for 10% off an order of qualifying products with a total of $25 or more.

Click here to visit the new products section of the website and check out the new goodies.

We’re always on the lookout for new ways to utilize materials, and more ways to incorporate the humbling beauty of nature into our artwork. We want to share with you a few new ideas we’ve been working on.

We’ve been really getting into raw crystal faced plugs as art jewelry/special occasion jewelry. You’ll sometimes see raw faced amethyst or citrine plugs, but we wanted to move past the common quartz variants into more interesting materials. We’ve recently worked two sets of beautiful crystal faced plugs that we’re very happy with.

The first is a base of fluorite with a matrix of rainbow pyrite and calcite growing from the surface. The pieces are 1″ in size, with a slightly larger front face.

The second set of crystal faced pieces we’d like to present are from a material never used in body jewelry until now. They are beautiful rough faced Cavansite specimens. The blue is just incredible, no photo could do them justice. They glow.

The next idea that we have been very excited about involves a childhood obsession with collecting fossils. These are, to our knowledge, the first pair of hardware set botanical fossil plugs that have ever been produced. They feature a ~300 million year old mirrored fern fossil from the Mazon Creek area of Illinois. The wood is Narra, and has a Mayan flare and angled faces to frame the inlays. The fossils themselves are hardware set with a reverse bezel setting that allows us to avoid wrapping a bezel around the front edge, and enabling us to maintain the natural height variation along the edge of the fossil itself.