Another way to work with silver

The Steveston Christmas Craft Fair is coming up quickly (Saturday, November 27th) and I will have to start preparing for it soon. For now, my mind is elsewhere because I worked with precious metal clay (PMC) for the first time yesterday and fell in love with it. Although it doesn't require any experience, my knowledge of pottery and silversmithing came in handy! Here are some of the pieces I made:

Amber alert!

A total of eleven items have been added to the shop including two custom pieces: the Kiwa necklace and the Julia earrings. The latter are miniature versions of the beautiful Lilyana. Here is a photo of the Delphine, which are the first earrings from ARIA INDUSTRIES to feature amber!

Pink is for girls

I am finally preparing to post items in the shop! It's a little slow but I expect to get some work done over the weekend. Here is another sneak peek in the meantime... This is the Delice necklace, which is one of my favourite showy pieces ever. The jawdropping centerpiece is a 59.50ct crystal quartz pendant it is topped with a large cluster of pink and white topazes, rose quartzes, and pearls.

On the blue blue waters

One of the upcoming pieces is the Zura, a showy yet featherlight pair of earrings. The design took several forms before I settled on the final look and they are in order here from left to right:

A new leaf

I have been on hiatus on the website rebuilding front because a couple of earring designs popped into mind. Here is the Aurora, which I recently made for a friend's workplace United Way fundraising campaign:

WWWork

I have been taking a break from making jewellery this weekend to attend to something that has been on my to-do list for a year. For the last two days, I have been busy cobbling together HTML and CSS because I am redesigning the Aria Industries website!

The new design has a lot of similarities with the current site at ARIAindustries.com, but there are some much needed changes including a smaller logo, the introduction of "rhapsody on a theme of sterling silver, gemstones, and pearls", and additional pages. However, the most notable difference is probably the non-white background, which makes for a more cohesive presentation of the content. Here is a mock up of the new site:


Now, compare that with the teeny tiny content block of the soon-to-be old design, which was created for smaller monitors:


This is actually not my first attempt to redo the .com site... I worked on a new look a year ago, but I'm glad I never finished because I no longer find it appealing. The colours were depressing, the content was difficult to manage, and the proliferation of photos on each page plus a gallery was overkill. This is the unfinished and abandoned design:


Bleck, right?

New stones, new designs

Two necklaces and eleven pairs of earrings have been added to the shop! The newest additions include stones that have not been used before, such as the pale blue-green hemimorphites in the Ondine earrings and the emeralds in the Val earrings. Sapphire also makes its debut in two pairs of earrings: there are tiny brown ones in the Arlene earrings and pink ones in the Inessa earrings as seen below:

One pair for each day

It's been more than a week since the Salmon Festival and I have been busy making new earrings. In fact, I had three days off this weekend and made three pairs of earrings! Coming soon will be the Inessa (pink sapphire and pearl), Johanna (cherry quartz and carnelian), and as seen here, the Melrose (amethyst, pink topaz, and garnet):

Afterglow

The Salmon Festival Craft Fair has come and gone, and with it went some of my jewellery. Three of my most memorable sales were the Claudia earrings (sold half an hour before the fair even started), the Felicia earrings (to Felicia, who couldn't take her eyes off the baby blue beads), and the brand new Diana necklace (a gift from a daughter to her mother). The day also included an exciting inquiry from someone who wanted custom jewellery to match her sari... If anything comes of it, I will definitely write about it here! Thank you to all my existing friends who stopped by and a big welcome to the new friends I made!

T minus zero

The 2010 Salmon Festival has finally arrived! Come visit me at the Steveston Community Centre gymnasium today and see some brand new pieces that have yet to be posted in the shop. One of them is this blue, green, and purple beauty... Here are the Val earrings, with apatite, emerald, vesuvianite, and amethyst: