A Little Wednesday Gift

To celebrate my new Fundamentals collection (see photo in yesterday's post), I'm having a little giveaway. Comment on this blog post, and I'll add your name to a drawing for a pair of Hammered Dome earrings, pictured here.



Happy Wednesday!

The Fundamentals Collection

I've been selling these simple, versatile pieces at shows all summer. They're crafted of hammered, polished sterling, and they pretty much go with everything. I wear a bracelet like this one almost every day, and the hammered dome earrings have become my "go-to" earrings. My morning routine isn't exactly leisurely - I usually shepherd my kids out the door and hope that I'm lucky enough to have grabbed matching shoes, so I rely on these simple earrings to pull what I will loosely call my "look" together. The texture, which catches the light beautifully as the earrings move, is just enough to make them striking.

I'll be adding some of these pieces to my Etsy shop later today.

It's Becoming a Trend, I Fear

Hmm. It's Monday morning, and my thoughts are a bit single-minded today so far. Seems like my last post was about not sleeping, too...seems to be a disturbingly common theme for me lately. I find myself daydreaming with visions of this:

When my coffee kicks in, I have a long list of projects to do. What's worse - using dangerous metalworking tools when I'm groggy or when I'm overcaffeinated?

Cute doesn't always cut it

Not much to post today - sleep deprivation will do that to you. Let's just say that I am NOT a morning person, but someone else in our house is:

Adorable, yes (she's bigger now, but I love that photo). But she'd be cuter at 7 am than she is at 5:30. Know what I mean?

At least she got me up and moving...I have a show to prepare for (Somerville ArtBeat on July 19) and I need to get to the bench!

My New Site is UP!

I've just finished some significant revisions to my web site - a new look, new photos, completely different style. You can see it here (warning - it's a flash site, so it takes a few seconds to load):

Stone Soup Jewelry

I'm thrilled with this site so far. I purchased it through BluDomain. Blu is a small company that offers dozens of funky templates and hosting. Their sites were originally designed for professional photographers, so they work well for visual artists, offering galleries and a few external links. There is a shopping cart available in some templates, though it's not the best for work other than photography. But I understand that there are some new designs coming out on July 25 with different shopping cart formats.

The people at Blu have been friendly, responsive and helpful. And I think my site's looking pretty good, if I do say so myself.

Free Shipping on Handmade Findings!

I've been very pleased with the response to my new supply shop, and so for the next week I'm offering FREE SHIPPING on all orders placed by my blog readers.


In order to take advantage of the shipping special, you'll need to select "Store Pickup" as your shipping choice at checkout - even though I will be sending your package via US Mail. Blog readers will get a little bonus with each purchase, as well. :)

If you have any questions, please leave a comment here and I'll respond.

You see my handmade jewelry findings at Stone Soup Jewelry Supplies.

Waiting...and Happy Meat.

Patience is not among my virtues.

I've been working on a new portfolio web site for my jewelry, and I'm thrilled with the way it's turning out, but now I've reached the stage where I have to wait for propagation (basically, I have to wait for servers all over the place to pick up and recognize my DNS changes, and this takes at least a day or two).

Unable to blather on about my work for now, I'll tell you about my latest foodie excitement. I posted a little while ago about the gorgeous produce we're getting from The Food Project CSA, and now on top of that we've joined a terrific meat CSA through Chestnut Farms. I'd been growing increasingly ambivalent about eating meat - while I do eat meat, I don't much like the livestock farming practices I read about. I don't think it's reasonable for humans to treat other living things as a commodity, exclusive of any other value. Yes, animals in the wild eat other animals, and being a carnivore is not inherently evil. But forcing a cow to stand in feces, or a breeding sow to live in a 2 foot wide gestation crate where she can't turn around or stand up straight, is just cruel. I've seen photos of these farms, even ones that are otherwise clean and well run, and it makes me sick. Knowing that the animals at Chestnut Farms have room to move around, interact with each other, and get attention from humans is a big deal to me. I will admit that the thought of adorable piglets turning into dinner is something that I still can't quite think about.


I spend a lot of time, and undoubtedly a bit more money, trying to buy food for my family that comes from sources we can feel good about. It was getting harder and harder for me to believe that the meat we bought was safe for us (no hormones, no additives) and came from animals that were humanely raised. So when I read about the family who owns Chestnut Farms, and how committed they are to their animals, to the quality of the food they produce, and to sustaining the land on which they farm, I was thrilled. These are people who get it - and who work really, really hard to make a difference - and I feel privileged to help support that work.

Of course, it's still pretty easy to be on the consumer end of all this. All I have to do is buy the food - the farmers here do all the really demanding work. But it's a start, and for now my kids are young enough that I can't really get them involved in the hands-on volunteer work at places like the Food Project. So for now, I take them to the farm to collect our produce (and pick some of it ourselves), and to the pickups for the meat, and I talk about why we're doing this, and hope that they're learning something important.