TribeBlog

I hope everyone has been having a great 2008! We’ve been hard at work designing and carving all sorts of nifty things to debut a bit later this year. Many new incredibly detailed and intricately carved designs are on the way. That’s all I’ll mention about the future because right now we have great stuff to talk about!

New Wood Spirals!

I just spent the past two days updating stock for a bunch of products on the site, namely most of our wood spirals. I’ve updated stock on the following products as well as extended the size range for a few of them.

• Bloodwood Spirals
• Pink Ivory Spirals
• Zebrawood Spirals
• Tiger Ebony Spirals
• Narra Burl Tight Spirals
• Narra Burl Drop Spirals
  

All of the new stuff is quite gorgeous, I always love updating this stuff. This week I’ll also be adding some larger detail photos for those products to help convey a little better the wood grain and patterning.

While we’re on the topic of spirals (and more specifically, hand carved exotic hardwood stuff), I’ve been asked quite a bit lately why some of the spirals, drop spirals, large sized wood rings and such can be a bit pricey. This is twofold – first, these designs take exponentially longer to make than plugs because they are completely made by hand from start to finish. It can take anywhere from an hour to half a day or more for us to complete a set of carved pieces.

The second reason is that some of these exotic hardwoods are very, very expensive and these carved pieces can be quite long or large in diameter (tight spirals and large wood rings for example). We price wood pieces partially by diameter, as rough wood is priced by diameter and many go up in price astronomically as the overall diameter increases. A set of 1/2″ tight spirals takes the same amount of wood as a set of 2″ plugs in that wood. A set of 1″ wood rings takes more wood than two pairs (that’s four plugs) of 2.5″ plugs. So there’s always this balance we have to strike between making sure we get paid for our time and/or don’t lose money on material and pricing things reasonably so that people can actually afford them.

So that’s that! Later this week we plan to start adding some very unique stone pieces in a new section on the site for individually listed products. We’ve got a bunch of 1.5″ and 2″ stone that is just gorgeous, there are a couple of photos below. We’ve also got various sorts of banded agates in the smaller sizes to go up, as well as some Obsidian that is proving to be impossible to photograph and all of the multi-colored Flint material we have from here in the USA will be added by color.

Did I mention that we have a batch of rare Chiapas green amber available? Pricing is yet to be determined (although admittedly it will be high end as the material is very expensive for us to obtain) and these plugs will likely be added as individual pairs like the stone. We’ve got from about 2g to 1″ in stock (yes, 1″ ‘green’ amber plugs) and the photo below should make some mouths water. We will be posting more information about why these are so special and what you can do if you want something custom from them a bit later. For now, enjoy!