I hope everyone who was celebrating “America’s Independence” had a safe and fun weekend. I also wanted to apologize if you were waiting for correspondence from us last week and it was late or non-existent. Our internet connectivity was down thanks to an “oops” by the phone company, and we were unable to access anything. We gave them a swift kick in the ass and things are well once more.
In the mean time we had our developer help us finish up the layout and formatting for our Enlightenment section of the site, and we added the first real content – the overview of our ADORN project and the beginning of our really, really extensive resources list. Almost every book listed we have available for reading here at the studio. The resources list will grow as we begin to contact more museums about their specific adornment related collections, and as we gather more books and articles for public viewing here at our studio.
We have some beautiful new pieces to showcase. The first is a small batch of jadeite tunnels of various colors and patterns. (You’ll find everything I’m talking about in the Unique & Rare section of our site). We’ve got some Guatemalan black jadeite made in a traditional four petal flower design, modeled after an actual set of Maya jewelry we own here at the studio. We’ve also got some black jade with pyrite flecks in it called Pyrita which is quite rare, and we’ve carved that into another traditional four petal flower design. There’s also the Chuconhueso material we’ve carved into flower tunnels. That set is 7/8″ but we have others. You can check out all of the jadeite by visiting the new jade material section we’ve added to the site. Here’s a photo of many of these items together, for jewelry-sex-appeal.
While we were at it, we decided to debut one of our new unique flower designs with a marvelous batch of beautiful amber from Chiapas, Mexico. There isn’t much carved amber available so we decided to fill a void in our hearts with these pieces. We’re all scrambling to find a way to make some new smaller holes (all of us have pretty big lobes) to be able to wear these goodies.
There’s a batch of virtually clear pieces that are free of inclusions as well as a fair amount of unique pieces available in various sizes that have inclusions and organic matter within. You can find those by visiting the Unique & Rare section of the site, or browsing the Amber material category.
You might notice in the unique section that we also added some other products – lavender jadeite plugs made of a beautiful light purple color Guatemalan jadeite, some pietersite plugs made from a Chinese stone that looks like someone took Tiger’s Eye and molded it like mixing different colors of Play-Doh, and some really nice ‘tortoise shell’ colored buffalo horn tunnels in various sizes that we’ve been collecting for a while. We’ve also restocked our Aztec Flowers and many of the regular products we stock on a daily basis.
As usual we’ve been doing a great deal of custom work when time permits, and we’ve finished a couple notable pieces recently. I think our favorites were the ‘mayan flared’ green amber pieces I made. Photos are below, enjoy!
Below, the photo seems out of focus but we were focusing on the edge to show color hue. Check out that green & green-blue!
Here’s what they looked like with bright sunlight shining directly through:
That Mexican amber is beautiful stuff, I love working with it. It makes me really happy to see pieces finished that still convey the same natural beauty that the material did in rough form.