I cannot believe how long it has been since my last post. It’s true what they say when you leave things for a period of time that it becomes harder to go to back to it, I kept meaning to do some blogging but it always got put to the back of the daily jobs and I never reached that far down the list lol. Unfortunately all the social networking got put on hold for various reasons but I do enjoy this side of the business to interact with customers or just people who have a common interest in jewellery and I have set myself some new goals for the foreseeable future. I do have a few topics and some new jewellery to share so I will be doing a fair amount of blogging over the next few days but thought I would change how I write the blog and make it  more open about us , our jewellery and life in general. As much as I love to share our  jewellery adventure with you guys I would like you to get to know us because we would like to a more open and engage more with you rather than being  boring with continual work blogs  although that is very important because I love to talk about jewellery but all work and no play makes jack a dull boy so I want to share lots of new topics and some personal stuff about us and somethings that get my blood boiling like talentless “Jewellers” who copy other Jewellers designs to get ahead! Right, Off for tea and cakes now.Just wish this was what I was going to get but mine looks like it has been dragged through a hedge backwards.

I cannot tell you how hot it was in the workshop today! And cannot believe how hot it still is, I’m melting away at the computer writing this blog. Well I’m going to blog about a customer we had last week that was asking for a Hebrew initial on our personalised initial necklace which was quite exciting (I’m very sad) as we haven’t used any other language other then English so I was intrigued to have a look at Hebrew text which looked so Alien to me as I have never seen it before, Need to educate myself more me thinks! I wasn’t sure how it would turn out as the letter was very thick in places so it was a test of my etching skills to get it right. I really enjoyed working on something a little different and hope very much to do other languages in the future just need to get my website out there into the big wide world! I forgot to take a picture when I made it (Doh!) but this is the letter M that we etched, this is my print out version for transferring to silver.

OK feel I need to get on with some serious blogging as I’m getting to far behind so here I’ am “Mr Sadurday nite” yes thats right SADurday nite and welcome to my madhouse, a screaming baby and a very loud toddler wanting to play my computer games and one mad hound stoating round the house looking for dropped food lol. Well I’m blogging for a reason tonight and its to write about another new piece which is our personalised silver rings bracelet. Our other rings bracelet with the gold and silver rings has been a great success but we had quite a few enquiries about an all silver one as not everyone likes gold. I had planed to put both bracelets on at the same time but due to lack of time, yes I know someone get the violins out! lol and lack of certain stock items I couldn’t get it on until now.Somethings you really do like to make and I love making this bracelet, its just so unique and something different to all the other bracelets out there that just look so similar to each other. I have added one new finding which I will add to the other bracelet which is the charm holder which looks fantastic on this bracelet and to me just completes it. I couldn’t believe how hard it was to find a charm holder, I did plan to use this in the original design but just couldn’t get my hands on one. If I wasn’t a bloke I would love to wear this but people might think I’m a big girls blouse as they say which there’s nothing wrong with but I have a reputation to pretend to have lol. Will have to look into designing a manly version! OK back onto the subject matter. The good thing I like about this bracelet is the person detail you can have on it, A name of a loved one or a special date in time that means so much. My favourite  is inspirational words because my niece is at university and for her last birthday I made her a gold and silver rings bracelet with three charms which had the words believe,dream and inspire just to give her a little boost when she finds it tough going. OK that’s enough waffle from me at the moment.

Well here we are again! Tuesday morning and  just managed to get the little one off to sleep so thought I would grab my chance to jump on the computer and write one of my rare blogs these days. I’ am struggling to get my eyes to open today its funny how you get days like that. Well time is a wasting so let me crack on with our new personalised piece before the little one wakes up.  We have had  great success with our Mummy keyring that we have made a family love keyring. As its father’s Day this weekend we made the mock-up with a Daddy message but this keyring will be for anyone and everyone, family,friends, and maybe even work colleagues if you like them lol. Everything on this piece is sterling silver, the actual keyring is a beautiful solid silver oval screw shape, thought I would just add this as it seems some people use stainless steel key- rings with a silver tag but make out that the whole thing is sterling silver which isn’t the case with us. We have cut out a piece of  shaped silver from sheet which measures 50mm long,10mm wide and 1mm thick so its a nice sized piece of silver to work with and get the text that we wanted on it. As you can see from my expert photography the two key-rings look like a pair of scissors lol. We tinkered with the idea of adding a charm or two but thought against it in the end as we feel it looks just right on its own and in proportion to the keyring so for this one it was best decided to leave well alone.

Well what a wonderful Royal wedding we had the  privilege of watching. Thought the occasion was fantastic with the large crowds that gathered up and down the wedding route. I was trying to see what jewellery was on show and I have to say there wasn’t that much and to be honest some of the guests pieces were dreadful, should have shopped with us! lol. Right now to our new product, might as well join the bandwagon and make a piece to coincide with the wedding. This is a personalised necklace for all those girls who would love to be the next princess. We are currently working on a range for this piece but in the meantime would like to see how this takes with our customers before we commit to other pieces which we are very confident in as with past history. We decided to make a simple piece to begin with which started with a sterling silver disc which measures 16mm in diameter and 1mm thick. We then etched the word princess and a picture of a crown which will be standard and then the name of your choice in this case we choose Kate for obvious reasons. The disc hangs from a beautiful bail which makes it more elegant and appealing and finally we  have given the option of having an Amethyst or Rose Quartz gemstone to sit along side a luscious white pearl.

After the mad rush of Mother’s day last week its a bit less frantic at the moment so I hope to get a few of my overdue projects started and a few overdue ones finally on the website, Ever the optimised lol. We have however added our wonderful personalised I.D bracelet for you wonderful people to purchase if you wish, Should have been a salesman with that pitch lol. We had quite a few designs for an I.D bracelet and hope to maybe make a couple more with very different designs.We chose this design because of the oval tag we use for our other personalised pieces and the fact that it works really well with the silver balls. We have had to cut down on the number of letters or numbers you can have on the tag due to it being drilled on both sides but looking into getting a bigger oval just have to see if it fits in with the design. Personalised items are all the rage at the moment so its tricky to come up with new ideas to make it unique to us but I think we pulled this one off due to our style and design which is unique to us. All I see at the minute is that one person has a bright idea and then everyone and their dog copies it, drives me mad! Think of your own designs lazy people! Alright enough of my man bitchiness lol. Just like to thank those who bought our new Mummy keyring for Mother’s day it was worth the rushed effort to get it on the website, Was very manic but got there in the end.OK going now just leave you with a photo of our I.D bracelet.

Well as we come to the end of another busy week it feels like I have more projects than when I started with LOL. We have been working on our new personalised piece which is the Mummy keyring which we are very happy with. As usual we are always playing catch up with different occasions through out the year so we were determined to get this out for mothers day. It took a few attempts to get the drawing of mummy but you have to be patient with etching as it can go wrong and can be very time consuming. We used a 30mm Heart shaped split ring which weighs 8.50 grams and is a solid piece of sterling silver. We thought Hearts and Mums go hand-in-hand so with Mothers day round the corner we thought this would make a great unique gift for mums the world over. The sterling silver disc is 26mm in diameter and is 1mm thick. We have given the option of having up to 40 characters in a child’s first print font  so plenty of room to fit those precious words for mum. As an option for customers they can have a child’s  drawing of a mummy which looks great and just completes this piece. The keyring is finished with a couple of sterling silver charms which are a key and a locked heart which we think adds to the theme of this design as you can see in the photograph below. We also applied a satin finish to keyring as it helps prevent scratching and keeps the piece looking better for longer.I look forward to completing the rest of the family, probably next year LOL. This is a beautiful gift and a wonderful keepsake for mums old and new.

Well here we are again another week that is just flying right by. Not doing as much blogging as I would like lately due to our two young boys that seem to be eating up our time. We have got lots of ideas and designs made or in the pipeline so its looking good for the future, Anyway lets get down to this blog which is about our bestselling Birds nest necklace and earrings. We have had a few designs of bracelets jotted down on paper for such a long time but as normal haven’t got round to seriously putting anything together, that was until we had a customer who wanted the necklace and earrings for her wedding but also a bracelet so we got down to work on designing a bracelet and these are two of final design drafts that we came up although it give us so many more. As you can see the first bracelet is designed for the more elegant look, very dainty not overpowering but just enough to have an effect when you are walking down the aisle. The second bracelet is a a dangle piece that is still very elegant but a a little more noticeable when walking along as the pearls swing around. All the pearls we used are very high quality with great luster and very few marks if any at all. We used a diamond belcher chain which gives it that dainty elegant look although I have tried it on a real thick chunky chain and it looks great so there’s another design for the future. Its amazing how many designs you can come up with when you have the same few materials.  Although I’ am a man and some women would say I haven’t a clue about weddings LOL, but I personally like women when they have all major jewellery pieces on by that I mean earrings,necklace and bracelet. I have seen numerous wedding photo’s were the bride just wears one or two pieces or even none and to me it just doesn’t look right, It can look lop-sided or incomplete but hey that’s just my opinion. OK enough of the wedding lecture  I’ll get off my soap box now.

Well this is only my second day back I decided to take an extra week off to recharge my batteries. I thought one of the first things I should do is get blogging again as I haven’t been able to due to work and time off. I would just like to say to all our customers thank you very much for buying from us we have had record sales for last year and over the xmas period it was just mad. Its funny how things work out as our two best sellers were our two newest products which were our personalised golf ball markers and our personalised children’s bracelet.We are looking forward to the year ahead as we have some new designs ready to go just waiting for some good weather so we can take some pictures. We also have some great new design ideas in the pipeline just hope we get time to make them!

Managed to get an hour to get some photo’s of the new Iridana necklace which has been on my to-do-list for some time. I have never really been happy with the cluster necklace as part of a set, I do like the necklace and I hope all the people that purchased one will agree but I wanted to keep the theme of the design like the bracelet and earrings so I went back to a simple but very effective design of the bracelet. The coin pearls we use are incredible, they are so round and smooth and they have a vibrant colour to them that just makes them glow. Now that the set is designed in the same way I think any bride would look breathtaking with this jewellery set on.