Blog Partner - new vintage jewelry

Beadin' Path gave me and excellent chance to expand my possibilities to create new vintage jewelry. A while ago we agreed about my participation to blog partner program. Shortly after agreement was made I received the very first package of jewelry components: really nice collection of vintage lucite beads.


Yesterday I had finally time to create the first jewelry with lucite beads. I just love the shiny, bright color. Vintaj brass seemed to be natural choice for vintage lucite. Peaceful color of brass balances jewelry and beauty of beads is more visible.

Berries of Autumn

I have used Vintaj Natural Brass bead, which has been opened, placed lucite incide and closed the bead. The same with the end of chain: there's cute filigree drop, inside there's small lucite bead. Combination of Vintaj and lucite, just the components that I enjoy to use in my jewelry making!

More lucite beads: http://www.beadinpath.com/

More Vintaj Natural Brass: http://www.frostylily.eu

Vintage-jewelry and pearls

Time has been flying really, where the summer even has gone? Finally I've received Vintaj and Trinity orders that I was waiting so much. It has been such enjoyable to create new jewelry and new style.

Winter rose

This delicate rose is made of shell. It's just gorgeous, shining and there are so tiny beautiful details in the rose. I've attached rose to Trinity antiqued silver connector, which has beautiful rose figures. There are several shell leaves on necklace, they're connected with fancy fleur-de-lis connectors. It will be my pleasure to design wedding jewelry for next years wedding shows.

Vintage-jewelry

When my sister saw all the jewelry findings, shells and pearls, she wanted to learn jewelry making also. She designed first these beautiful shell earrings (on the right lower corner) with fuchsia freshwater pearls. I have lost my heart to abalone shells, they're so amazing. Shining in different colours and each one is unique peace, there are no two the same! There's also my first trial to combine synthetic gemstone with freshwater pearls, fall leaves match so well together with fuchsia pearls.

Recognition and confession

Thanks for Marjo who gave me a blog recognition. She has challenged me also to spread this award among bloggers so here it goes.

When you receive this award, so must do the following 7 points:

Give thanks to whom you have received recognition for

Copy and paste the image to your blog

Put a link to the person from whom you received recognition for

Mail-seven cases of yourself, what others do not yet know

Give recognition to seven

Link to this blog

Tell them to seven confession

Seven things that others don't know about me? Hard, since I'm open and talkative...

1. I didn't like beaded jewelry before I saw Marjo's blog and her jewelry
2. I learned to make twisted link only recently
3. I make jewelry at night, I'm a night bird
4. I was scouting when I was child and I loved it
5. People say I'm a child of nature, maybe because of my creativyness
6. I'm a little bit shy and cover it by talking a lot
7. I like more netshopping than "real" shopping

And the seven blogs who get this recognition? Here's a list of my favourite blogs (unfortunately can't give Marjo this recognition back) and I challenged authors of these blogs to spread the recognition:

• http://nelliina.blogspot.com/
• http://blog.helmetti.fi/
• http://buttonwilloe.blogspot.com/
• http://europe-artisans.blogspot.com/
• http://justatish.blogspot.com/
• http://unelmiasirpaleita.blogspot.com/
• http://artbeadscene.blogspot.com/

Now it's your turn to confess, we love reading!

Broken dreams, falling stars, just life...

DICE OF FORTUNE

Once as a child I asked a falling star

for a good fortune on life,

I didn't expect years lonelyness,

not a war for money,

not a lost love, 

not tears which were so hard

that they crashed like crystals dropping on floor,

Just when I believed I failed,

raised wintry full moon,

lightening thousands and thousands of stars,

and when I saw one falling star,

I wished for nothing,

I knew I got a fortune long ago,

without that

I wouldn't even understand

the beauty of the stars on the sky.

-T.A. 

Broken Dreams

Vintage jewelry

Adorable fairy

GoldLily got finally a distributor agreement with Vintaj Natural Brass Co. The very first vintage style brass findings have been ordered and I have a lot of new inspirations. Beautiful components and filigrans faschinate and inspire to new trials.

This will be a stunning middle part of necklace or bracelet. It would be just a perfect hair jewelry!

Brass is long-lasting and affordable jewelry material. Jewelries can be protected finalizing them with wax (not mandatory with Vintaj), but Vintaj-brass does not get rusty or turn into green when touching skin. These components are free of nickel and lead (what a wonderful thing for an allergic person). Vintaj is using only copper and zink to manufacture brass; that way they achieve good qualities of jewelry metal and beautiful outlook.

Component for earring or an pendant. Ideas are unlimited

Within a couple of weeks I've received ordered components and can finally design Vintage jewelry. Until that I have to satisfy myself with creating other jewelry and be patient...

More information about Vintaj

Trick-Or-Treating

Again it's time for Halloween, the worldwide popular "trick or treat" eve. The origin of Halloween lies in the traditions of the Celtic people: the ancient Celts were celebrating Samhain, which is a celebration of the end of the harvest season in Gaelic culture, and is sometimes regarded as the "Celtic New Year". The term Halloween is shortened from All Hallows’ Even, which is now also known as All Saints’ Day.

Weruniquestyles: Meet the Mr Pumpkin, candle

The ancient Celts would place a skeleton on their window sill and believing that the head was the most powerful part of the body, they used the head of vegetable to frighten off the embodiment of superstitions. the The most well-known decoration, pumpkin, origins of Irish legend of Stingy Jack, a greedy, gambling, hard-drinking old farmer. He tricked the devil  and in revenge, the devil placed a curse on Jack: to forever wander the earth at night with the only light he had: a candle inside of a hollowed turnip.

GoldLily: silver Halloween jewelry

The famous "trick or treat" has two possible origins. According some legends, Celts would give offerings of food to the Gods, so they often went from door to door to collect food to donate to their deities. The other belief is that young Celts would ask the townspeople for kindling and wood, and take it to top of the hill for the Samhain bonfire.

It is the custom of the celebration to use orange and black in decorations and costumes.  As the Celtics are given the most credit for beginning the holiday as the festival of the harvest, a color of autumn is used. Orange, being the most prevalent autumn tone, is derived from the pumpkin and leaves. Halloween was once (and still may be in some areas) a festival of the dead. Death is usually associated with darkness and absence of light signified by the color black. Also Halloween is always celebrated after sunset. The blackness of the night cloaks the revelers and hides their misdeeds or tricks if they don’t receive any treats.

Redneckcandles: special soap for Halloween

Today Halloween is celebrated around the world. Many of traditions and customs are nowadays American traditions, even the celebration origins in Europe. It's time to start preparing, to buy candies for children and check the decorations. There's still time to find something unique for the All Hallow Eve!

-All products shown in this post can be purchaced from Artfire Verified Member, please contact the shop mentioned below the photo.

Book review: Silver Clay Basics

Popularity of silver clay (actually all precious metal clays) has grown rapidly. More and more crafters are joining classes to explore the fashinating world of silver. It is very easy to create unique jewelry from silver thus temptating jewelry crafters. Without soldering it is possible to make pendants, rings, bracelets, anything.

"Silver Clay Basics" offers wide variety of ideas. Even the book is in English, it is pretty easy to follow instructions without English skills. The book offers a lot of information about silver clay, how to handle it, techniques and gives inspirations to try different ways to use silver clay. It is speciality written for beginners, but it offers very delicated models for experienced crafter. Silver Clay Basics is excellent book for source of inspiration and I recommend book for every jewelry crafters home library.

My very first trial with silver clay, butterfly with zirconias

Magic Of The World in Swarovski Crystals

Lucky Charm, The Symbol Of Love

The hot indian summer is coming to an end, fall begins. Days are shorter and less sun shine day after day. With Swarovski crystals you can expand summer to last whole dark season until next summer. At fall nature is glowing in different colors. The same colors are sparkling on crystals.

Swarovski has gotten newest inspiration from breathtaking beauty of nature. New-becomers in Swarovski family are Purple Blossom and Enchanted Microcosm according Swarovski webmagazine. Fairies and elfs, dream creatures are captured to Microcosm. Purple Blossom symbolizes the spiritual richness of life with its magical shades and the range of hues. Swarovski obviously has understood the worlds growing intrest to Harry Potter, Fairies and other magical figures.

Trendy 80's is back again, symbols are the word of the season. Crosses, hearts, lucky charms should be weared with pride as well as graffiti look, showing Rock'nRoll attitude with colorful necklaces and bracelets.

Enjoy darkening evenings using sparkling Swarovski and indulge in this mysterious and magical world of symbols, fairies and elfs.

Angels waiting for Christmas

This year I will participate Women's Christmas Fair at Helsiki Wanha Satama 2-6.12. At the fair finnish women are introducing and selling high quality handmade products. The goods at the fair are excellent purchases for Christmas presents and accessories.

Women's Christmas Fair has been established 1922 when Women organization Naisasialiitto Unioni arranged first fair. Original purpose for the fair was to get some money for women before Christmas. Nowadays fair is supporting women culture, researches and publications. As in the earlier years there's also this year charity booth of Seniors. In the Senior booth goods are made by seniors and all the profit is given to seniors.

Women's fair is unique fair since only women can be selling goods, even though man can be assisting. There are nearly 20 000 visitors every year in the fair.

There will be new jewelry designs, bracelets, chains for ties, necklaces and of course special Christmas jewelry to wear at Christmas parties or during Christmas days. GoldLily's high quality handmade jewelry is excellent choise for a present for man or woman, child or adult. You'll find GoldLily the Hall B, booth 22 (booth map of Wanha Satama).

There will be a contest in GoldLily booth: one of visitors will get a beautiful jewelry for prize. The jewelry will be published before fair in the blog so keep following the newest posts!
Welcome to Women's Fair to see the newest jewelry and just to meet and chat.

Lucite beading

Red Daffodil with bali silver and Swarovski crystal

Today I made some new designs, got finally Lucite beads that I ordered. Lucite is Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) ie. kind of acryl. It started off being used for costume jewelry and in the 1950s became extremely popular. There are reproduction of lucite and real vintage lucite beads. Vintage beads are sometimes hard to find and they are more expensive than reproduction lucite beads.

There are a huge amount of variety of lucite beads. They come from almost all shapes that you can imagine: plenty of different kind of flowers, leaves, animals, typical round beads etc. It's rather easy to combine different materials with lucite beads, gold filled wire and findings, sterling silver. One of the most attractive way is to combine antiqued brass or antiqued silver with lucite beads.

Blue lucite lilies as Angels dress

 
Lucite beads inspire artist to new challenges. With imagination original shape can be changed. I used lucite lilies to create angels dress. Next challenge is to use black lucite beads to design Halloween jewelry.

Contest for Promotion and Free Verified Membership in Artfire

We love contests and we hope that you do too. In order to make this more temptating, I'm offering free promotion for your studio and free Arfire Verified Membership!

Join Artfire Member http://www.artfire.com/modules.php?name=power_up&refuid=39264
Refer other crafters to join at site at http://gold-lily.blogspot.com/. There is NO LIMIT to referral entries! Just make sure to remind them that when they refer they need to use the link on blog.

First 12 referrers will get:

1. A blog post about you shop and the link to our site: http://gold-lily.blogspot.com/ and http://kultalilja.blogspot.com/
2. Promotion of your shop in Twitter twice per day for one week period
3. Promotion of your shop in Facebook twice per day one week period

One of the referrers will be chosen to get Verified Artfire Membership..

How to participate

1. Click on link above to sign Artfire Verified Membership
2. Send e-mail kultalilja(at)gmail.com
3. You must sign up as a paid verified member for the referral to count as a point (Basic signups who later convert will NOT count).

Chosen Winner Verified member will get

• full functionality and the ability to list unlimited items in your Fusion Studio absolutely free for life
• That's a savings of $144/year for each of you just for sharing what you love about ArtFire.com and as our way of recognizing your commitment to the success of the community!
• Each of the people who sign up will also get Free Ride program offer in their My Artfire until the end of the promotion.
• Promotion schedule for participants will be agreed separately with each participant.

The contest will run for a limited time. I'll give you a 30 day countdown once the end date of the contest is set.

Have fun and good luck!

Today's featured: Valmade

Today's featured artisan is Valmade. You could call her a jack of all trades. She knits, sews, cross stitches and makea cards, and hopea to one day master crotchet. Valmade loves making things and always has numerous projects on the go. She's from England and lives now in Hong Kong. Crafts she has been doing since being young. Some of her designs could be be personalised to make a great gift for a new baby, wedding or any other occasion.
Her customer's are really pleased with her work: "Wonderful to deal with", says Dichroid Creations.

Time to start to think Christmas cards

Visit Valmade: http://valmade.artfire.com

Crafts in Finland

The exhibition organizers are busy to arrange craft fairs  around the year in Finland. In a country with 5 million inhabitants there are several national shows every year, dozens of local shows and a few special international shows. Thousands of Finns are visiting these fairs and no question why. Huge amount of Finns work with craft daily or they spend their leisure time sewing, knitting, making jewelry, any kind of craft.

Internet has provided a new possibilities to find materials, ideas, inspiration. A lot of Finns are ordering their materials from Internet, using wholesalers around Europe or individual seller in Etsy or Artfire. Anyhow, there has been quite a lot of barriers for Finns to find suppliers abroad. Finland belongs to European Union and there are custom regulations if ordering from outside of EU. Even Finns are taught English at school, many of them don't have necessary language skills to find suppliers or to order goods. Also payment is one barrier: a lot of Finns just don't have credit card or they are worried about using card in Internet.

Even though finding suppliers is not always easy task, Finns still expand variety of craft supplies sold by local resellers. Many of crafters have started their business selling first their own work, buing materials in Internet just to notice, that supplying materials to other Finns is worth of work.

One of leading crat is jewelry. There are hundreds of courses every year held in local communities. During last decade beading and making wired jewellery has gotten extremely popular. Every year a lot of jewelry makers are gathering to Ylämaa, where is every year international gemstone show. No wonder, that Finns are keen on jewelry making: one of the most intresting jewelry competition is Lapponia contest, targeted to jewelry designers around the world.

To explore more about Finnish jewelry crafters, visit http://kultalilja.blogspot.com/. Even it is written in Finnish, there are plenty of photos of Finnish style and links to other jewelry makers pages.

Featured Artisan: Luv To Sparkle

On ArtFire Crazy Train riding now Luv To Sparkle. Artisan makes hair accessories, magnets, rings, different kind of jewelry. Luv To Sparkle products are made from crystal, resin, pearls. There are a lot of heart shaped resin pendants for all those who love tho wear symbol of friendship, love and show the sparkle of joy. If you're looking for a present to a your dearest friend, visit Luv To Sparkle. And for your biggest day, wedding, just wear "Something blue".

Something Blue - just for a wedding day

Visit the shop: http://www.luvtosparkle.artfire.com/

CONTEST SOON

Gold Lily will announce a CONTEST for all artisans soon. Follow a blog and get your chance to participate!
You increase your chances to participate by following the blog.
And remember to SUBSCRIBE for updates.

Don't miss your chance to win SILVER EARRINGS AND FREE ARTFIRE VERIFIED MEMBERSHIP!

How to Get More Followers on Twitter

After reading a lot of articles how to get more followers on Twitter I decided to publish an article myself about that. There are a lot of great tutorials written about this subject and I will provide here some of the good links I found.

Here's the best advices that I've seen:

1. Be intresting: Find a way to make people smiling, even if you would be telling what you had for breakfast.
2. Be useful: Provide some value to others by what you write. Solve your followers problems, offer them something that they need: information, entertaintment, advices, tips, laugh, latest news...
3. Be promotional: Self-promotion is great tool. Give followers links to your posts, title's of your blog newest article.
4. Be personal: turn off all robots, write yourself. People don't like spamming.
5. Fill out your bio and your personal information. People want to know with whom they connect. Your bio is displayed on Twitter’s Suggested Users page. Leaving it blank or non-descriptive doesn’t encourage people to add you.
6. Tweet about your passions in life and #hash tag them.
7. Link yourself everywhere. Facebook, blog, forums, LinkedIn...
8. Follow the top twitter users and watch what they tweet. Pay attention to the type of content they sent out and how they address their audiences.
9. Ask qestions for Information: There are several reasons for this:
1. Asking questions can lead to fruitful discoveries and real relationships with followers
2. Asking questions is great for helping you to learn which can be very useful if you’re researching a blog post
3. Asking questions will draw people to ‘reply’ which (as I’ve already mentioned) will have a viral impact as those answering will show their own followers that they follow you
4. Asking a relevant question will draw many followers out of lurk mode and into an active engagement with you.
10. Use a Profile Picture that Reinforces Your Brand: Your Avatar is one important factor - it appears next to every Tweet you make as well as on your profile page. Keeping your profile pictures consistent across your social networks will help people to find you and recognize you also off-line. If you have memorable logo of your company, you may concider using it to increase brand recognition.
11. Reply to tweet: here's how to do it: http://www.twitip.com/twitter-as-dinner-conversation-a-guide-to-using-replies/
12. Reply to/get involved in #hash tag memes. search.twitter.com lists the hot ‘trending topics. Look for the #hash topics and jump in on the conversation (see #11 for link to reply instructions).
13. Follow others. The simpliest way is to follow others who share intersts. If they find your bio or website intresting they'll follow you back.
14. Tweet often. Not tweeting is one of the biggest reasons to loose followers. When you tweet, you're paying attension to all your followers. Make some goal how often you tweet, at least once per day.

Remember to follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com.goldlilyjewelry/


Good articles about Twitter and how to get more followers:

http://www.lostartofblogging.com/twitter-guide

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/01/25/how-to-use-twitter-tips-for-bloggers/

http://www.twitip.com/how-to-get-more-followers-on-twitter/

http://www.twitip.com/how-to-grow-your-follower-numbers-to-over-10000-in-a-week/

http://www.doshdosh.com/7-ways-to-use-microblogging-services-for-traffic-and-brand-exposure/


 Enjoy tweeting and growing amount of followers! Tweet...tweet...

Featured Artist of the Day - CreativeCritters

CreativeCritters makes polymer clay sculptures, mixed media jewelry, adorable handsewn cloth dolls, knit stuffed toys, polymer clay pen sets, and World of Warcraft plush characters. The Artisan behind CreativeCritters has been an artist since she was child. She loves animals, nature, and the world of fantasy and this is reflected in her sculptures.

Isn't this amazingly cute?

She also makes very detailed miniature polymer clay houses surrounded with beautiful landscaping. One of her log cabins was featured in the October 2008 issue of Polymer Cafe magazine. Fantasy has always lighted a creative spark in her, and many of her sculptures sprang into life with that spark. Fairies, wizards, gnomes, trolls, and dragons have all been sculpted over the course of her artistic career. Her talents has been noticed: "Scorch the Rockin' Dragon" was featured in the February 2009 issue of Polymer Cafe magazine.

Nature and recycling is important aspects of her career: she tries to use recycled materials as well- everything has a use! She never throws out clothing, old purses, or trinkets that could be turned into something new. That's something that we all should learn: to be inspired by turning something old to something new, contemporary, just a piece of art as CreativeCritters does!

Got intrested in? Find CreativeCritters at Artfire: http://creativecritters.artfire.com/

Blog grand opening!

Finally my blog is opened. I'm adding texts, photos, links, gadgets as much as I have time. So far it has been really intresting to see that my blog in Finnish has gotten readers. Guestbook will be the same in Finnish blog and in English blog so all my visitors will be seen in both sites.

Here's the first photo to this blog, it has been success in Finland:

Valkyria chain

Valkyria is made from gold filled and sterling silver wire with gold filled beads. After making the design so far I ran out of sterling silver wire. Maybe for good since while I waited to receive my order a lot of design possibilities came up to my mind! Within a week I'll have a several variants of Valkyria chain created and hopefully I can add photos of them to this blog.