TribeBlog

Over the past year we have released a few, primarily custom or one of a kind, pieces of jewelry which featured variations of the symbol ’swastika.’ Those pieces have been very well received, overall, and we’ve had considerable requests for similar pieces that others could add to their own collections.

The swastika is one of the earliest human symbols, in use perhaps 10,000 years ago in the Indus River Valley, and with use across most of Asia and Southeast Asia as well as North and Central America since then. Countless individual cultures have scratched, drawn, painted, molded, tattooed and scarred their unique variations on the swastika into their art, architecture, religious rights and bodies for thousands of years.

While we do not in any way wish to underplay or devalue the Nazi re-appropriation of this symbol as a means for their own twisted reasons, we believe that this is a symbol which belongs to all of humanity, and that it should not fade into existence as a tainted version of its former beauty. This initiative is important to us and we feel that especially now, a universal symbol of peace and calm for humanity is something that is worth clinging to. What better symbol than that which we’ve used for perhaps ten thousand years?

In support of the fragmented worldwide mission to reclaim the swastika as a symbol of peace, we have collaborated with friend and brilliant artist and tattooer Marc of Little Swastika in Radolfzell, Germany to bring to fruition a small collection of swasti inspired plugs. The collection consists of some pieces that are more subtle, and some that are more easily discernible, but all designed and carved with nothing but respect and love for the history and the symbol: these are gentle swastikas.

Below is a photo of many of the original prototypes carved from drawings. Most of these will make it into production in various materials as we have the resources to make them.

We currently have small runs of several of these in a couple of materials and we will be releasing them on a schedule for the rest of the month of November. Below you will find the pieces and their release dates.

Friday, November 4th – Tiger Ebony Lotus Swasti & Ebony Square Swasti

Friday, November 11th – Bloodwood Lotus Swasti & Tiger Ebony Square Swasti

Friday, November 18th – Spiral Leaf Swasti & Butterfly Swasti

Friday, November 25th – Fishtika

We will continue to release the remaining styles as well as expanding the sizing and materials offerings later in the year and into next year. We welcome questions and comments on the history and use of the swastika itself, and we have plans for an article dedicated to this topic on our new website. In the mean time, we suggest checking out a few of these resources.

The Gentle Swastika: Reclaiming the Innocence – The best guide that we know of about the history behind the peaceful use of this symbol, including information by culture, region and timelines of use. Showcases a variety of historical records, artifacts and photographs of religious use of the gentle swastika, as well as use in architecture, clothing and pre-war commercial products, including Coca-Cola ads and sports team sweaters. Local customers are welcome to come in and read our copy.

Gentle Swastika Collective Directory – A collection of reader submitted and found photographs showing historical use of the swastika around the world in architectural use, jewelry, clothing, products, etc. Also, modern art works, tattoos, etc. showing modern peaceful use.

Little Swastika’s Overview – Marc (who illustrated the initial images for many of the plugs in this new collection) has a short informational page on his site that is a good read.

Reclaim the Swastika – A small site devoted to a concise overview of the history of peaceful use.

Swastika on Wikipedia – A suprisingly good overall history of worldwide use. Wikipedia obviously isn’t the end-all of factual resources, but this is quite a good overview.

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’ve got some new products to talk about! We’ve done a small restock of various regular products in addition to adding a few new ones. We did a large run of styles we already make, as well as some new ones in Bloodwood. The styles we already had were the Aztec Flower and the Koi plug, now available in Bloodwood.

The two new styles we’re offering in Bloodwood are the Maya Flower and the Hopewell Flower.

We have also been working on a couple of silver designs, one we’ve talked about before and one that is new. The first is the Dayak pear weight reproductions. 1.5″ tall, 50 grams of .925 silver. The second is the leaf weight, 2″ tall, 21g of .925 silver.

Enjoy!

I figured I should get off my rear and get some of this stuff posted up These are all new original Onetribe LLC designs that will be going into production later in the year. There are a few that are going to be limited edition. One of those is our Chaak mask, which is shown here in 1″ from Bloodwood, but we can do it at other sizes and in other materials. We will likely only do a limited run of a certain number of sets. As you can see, they are branded on the back. They measure 1.5″ wide at the ears and 3″ long.

Speaking of masks, I also have these little gems. They’re a little crazy looking due to having just been oiled but you get the idea Three dimensional faces in Bloodwood. They are a little bit awesome, in my opinion. Designed so that the back of the face rests flush against the lobe and the face is the front flare. Very ear gargoyle-esque.

We like sugar skulls and we’re working on a line of them. Here are the first couple, in moose antler at 3/4″.

I’m kind of a fruitcake for flowers, and anyone that has watched Onetribe over the years has probably noticed that. We’ve had various sorts of semi-realistic flower designs and culturally inspired pieces like the Mayan flowers we offer. These are the former, and they are representative of a kind of Chrysanthemum we thought was pretty rad.

I also have an unhealthy man-love for really nice hanging styles, even though at my size I can’t wear them. When I was around 0-00g I wore hanging styles almost exclusively. These are really beautifully intricate pieces carved from moose antler, and we’ll be offering them in other materials as well. They are carved in the round and not only have several points where the design overlaps itself but they are also directional (the two sides are different).

I’m on kind of an art deco kick recently and we’d had these illustrated for quite a while. We decided to finally carve ‘em up and see how they turned out and I am pleasantly surprised with them. These are from shell, but of course they can be done in other materials.

I’ve been wanting to do some more geometric designs for a while now, and after I had so much fun working on the Indian Bloodstone Hopewell flowers I made a while back (which by the way we have put into production in both stone and wood), we decided to whip out the sketchbook and use some of the designs we’d been sitting on for a while. These are various Mesoamerican themed (but original) geometric flower plugs and geometric tunnels. We’ll be producing them in an array of materials. The flower pieces will also be done in a Mayan flared style with the flower petals as the flare.

I’d love feedback on any of these items, or suggestions for materials and sizes you guys would like to wear them in!

On the current stock front, I know we’re pretty low in some items right now, so bear with us. We’re working on a stock run of everything we currently carry to try and freshen up. If there’s anything wood wise you need we can make that to order, so regardless of what the stock on the site says, get in touch for that stuff and we can probably squeeze it in for you.

I’ll also have an update soon on the sustainability & urban agriculture non-profit project that myself and another local business owner are involved in. We just got a wonderful donation that will help us get our first community garden and greenspace project off the ground, and we recently gained access to a huge greenhouse on the grounds of an elementary school that we plan to do a childrens educational garden in, as well as some crops for donation to the local food bank and other local organizations (after school programs, summer camp lunches, etc). Everybody deserves fresh, healthy local food!

We just finished getting the new stuff online, which is great because I have a zillion other things to do today before I leave for Indonesia at 4am. Right now we’re working on a big carving order that will restock a ton of the more common products on the site we’ve been neglecting while working on new styles and materials. For right now though, we’ve got the last bit of the new stuff to show off.

First up we’ve got some new Aztec Flower plugs carved from Tiger Ebony which are just gorgeous and I <3 them. This is definitely one of my favorite designs and I think the grain in these makes them really unique – you see the wood itself from a distance and then realize there’s a carving there. Some pieces are darker, some are lighter. We look at it as buying a wood, not a pattern. We should also have these stocked in bloodwood soon too

We’ve also carved two of our newer Maya/Aztec themed designs, the Quetzalcoatl and Tonatiuh in bloodwood in keeping with our mission to have vegan options for most designs. They look quite sexy, too!

We had some beautiful stock of porcelain jasper and decided that in addition to plugs, it would make great stone rings. We don’t make these very often as they are time consuming and fragile, but we thought these would definitely be worth the effort.

We had a couple of relatively small pieces of petrified stone – some petrified coral and petrified palm wood, that we’d been sitting on for a while here in the studio. We decided they needed to be worked and put them into production. They were both quite small, around fist sized, so we were only able to get a small range of sizes from each.

While not new, we did do a much needed restock of both of our Koi styles, the carved Koi in Ebony as well as the horn version with bone inlay. If you guys want these in any other woods or anything, let us know and we’ll make it happen.

We’d been slacking for a while on some wood septum pieces for our veg friends and just those that wanted a little more color in their lives. We’ve released our septum spikes in tiger ebony and bloodwood. We plan to do the curves in other woods as well, and finally get a proper septum pincher style worked out.

That’s most of the exciting stuff. There were a couple other minor restocks or additions of a pre-existing horn design in bone, etc. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to get in touch. Enjoy guys!

Jared & The Onetribe Team

Bought jade over the weekend, came back with some good stuff. Some of these pieces will end up being made into production items, particularly the eleven pound blue-gray monster and the ~10lb Chuconhueso piece (which is so spectacular that we are actually making payments on it.. how funny is that? But it was the last piece and I didn’t want to lose it, so…)

I have a couple of interesting pieces I would prefer to use for one off custom projects, and they are pictured below. I can get up to 2″ out of all of them, and a few I can get up to 2.25 or 2.5.

I can get about 2″ pieces from this, as thick as you’d need. I will not cut this for pieces less than 1.5″ in size, it’s too unique. This is way one of a kind, I’ve never seen a piece this wild that was blue.

A while back I had some people asking about white jade. I picked up a nice hunk of this white with slight lavender mottling throughout that is available for custom pieces. I can squeeze 2″ pieces from this, but I am open to anything 1.25″ and up.  If the lavender was darker it would be $$$, but the mottling is very subtle so they would be reasonably affordable in comparison to some of these other pieces. If no one jumps on it between now and early March it’s going into production and will most likely end up as a run of 0g-1.5″ish standard plugs.

This is a gorgeous piece of jade. It is very tight grained and extremely translucent. I was shown a slab of it about 5/8″ thick and the green glows bright in the light. I can get 2″ pieces out of this and would prefer to do them close to or at that size because we’d be able to fit so much gorgeous variation in them – I would likely utilize the white swirling encasement around the green in the pieces for some nice contrast. Any carved details that were green (flowers would look AMAZING from this) would likely be very translucent. No idea on cost, depends on the project.

I could probably squeeze 3″ pieces out of this. It’s a gorgeous color, lots of pattern variation, slightly translucent when cut thin. Would like to do larger pieces, but if nobody jumps on it, it’s going to get cut up. You are welcome to request specific sizes and when we do the production run I will make sure it gets done.

Third largest piece of jade I’ve ever owned at 11lbs, and second most expensive (due to the size, really). Really pretty light/pale blue-gray color with some nice color variation and minimal pattern. You’re welcome to request large custom pieces (ie, not plain plugs) from this if you like, and I’ll work on getting it done. If you would like normal styles we’d sell on the site, or flowers or something, make it known and when we do the production run I will try to accommodate your size.

I can’t cut this up yet, because I don’t own it 100%. It will likely become half custom stock and half production run. If you’d like anything from it, make it known and we’ll try and accommodate that. I do have another piece of this (I bought it on my last trip and it’s actually another piece of this block) available for custom stuff. Could squeeze close to 2″ out of it.

If you are interested in any of the above, please get in touch and let us know. Requests for custom orders should be directed to us via email. Suggestions for sizing and styles (please only suggest things you’d like to buy so I don’t spend time making things to have them sit around) can be left in the comments.

Do keep in mind that we have the capability to make virtually anything, so if you’d like a piece of fine jewelry that is non piercing jewelry, cabochons, normal earrings, speak up. We are jewelers and artisans, not “plug makers” I will be in Indonesia for most of March at our other workshop, and I am not scheduling anymore new custom projects between now and March 11th when I leave because I’m already swamped. They will pick up again April 1.

Got the new batch of amber material in over the weekend as well, although I have not had time to polish most of it, holding it up to the sun I can see that it’s quite solid and very good stuff. I appreciate the suggestions from you guys in the comments forum of that last post, and we’ll be going through them and deciding if we feel comfortable making any of them as small production runs.

Busy Busy! Happy Monday!