Giveaway Week 3! Ear Cuffs from Shut Up and Cuff Me!

This week's giveaway will have THREE winners! There are several prizes to choose from, so the first winner drawn will get first pick, the second winner drawn will get to pick second, then the third winner drawn will get to pick from the prizes below.

Use the rafflecopter widget below the photos to enter!

P.S. Shut Up and Cuff Me is having a sale this week. All items are 15% off the regular price!

Brass and Red Glass Steampunk Style Ear Cuff and Earring set.

 

Blue crystals and woven gold colored ear cuff.

Gold colored and glass beads earring and ear cuff set.

 

Blue glass and silver colored steampunk style ear cuff.

 

 Blue glass and silver colored steampunk style ear cuff #2.

Sterling silver treble clef ear cuff.
(there is more than one of this style available)

Quartz crystal point and vintage brass colored woven ear cuff.

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This Week's Giveaway - A Necklace from Gailavira Jewelry!

This week's giveaway prize is a beautiful sterling silver and Lapis Lazuli necklace!  See terms below the rafflecopter widget.

A deep blue Lapis Lazuli cabochon, wrapped in oxidized sterling silver wire, hangs from a black organza neck cord.

Pendant is approximately 11/16" (24mm) wide and 1 1/4" (32mm) long. Necklace is 17 1/2" (43.75cm) long with a 2" extender chain.

Prize value: $60

To enter the giveaway, use the rafflecopter widget below.

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Winner will receive a Lapis and Sterling Silver Necklace from Gailavira Jewelry. The necklace being given is pictured in the following blog post: http://goo.gl/fjXy3

To enter you must comment on this blog post. This will earn 2 points. More points can be earned using the other entry options available through the giveaway widget.

For users who choose to earn extra entries through twitter:
All new follows and tweets will be verified. If the tweet and follow do not remain on the users profile for the duration of the giveaway, the corresponding entry for that tweet will be removed.

The tweet must contain the following info to be eligible:
"Win a necklace from Gailavira Jewelry!  http://goo.gl/fjXy3"
User may add to the tweet if desired, but the line above must be unaltered for the tweet to result in a valid entry. If the above information is intact and the entry is deemed valid, user will receive 2 entry points for the tweet.

Relatives of anyone associated with Gailavira Jewelry are not eligible.

A Space just for Me

Ever since I started making jewelry again I've been collecting "stuff". Stuff which most people would consider invaluable tools of their trade. Unfortunately for me, it has been utterly useless stuff. Why? Because until now I've had absolutely no space to use it. For the last 9 years I've been living in a 720 square foot apartment. With such a small number there, you can guess that the rooms are pretty small. I'm also sharing that apartment with a teenager who is a space hog and 5 precious little monster kitties. The only place I was able to keep everything safe was in my bedroom. Well, since I had to have a bed in there, a dresser, and all the other things that go in an average bedroom, that left little space for me to work. Out of a 10ft x 10ft room, I had about a 4ft x 4ft space to work in, take photos, and store all of my supplies. As you can imagine, that left little room for me to play with everything.

So, since the apartment next to mine was empty, I decided I needed it. Desperately! And now I have many rooms to work and play in. One room is for wirework and photography (pictured above). I'll be setting up the kitchen for metalwork and polymer clay (It's a BIG kitchen). One room is set up for packing and shipping orders. And I'll still have two more rooms left to play with.

I've only been working there a few days now, but it already feels like a second home. I still need to finish getting everything set up. What's in the photo is temporary. I need to somehow get my big sturdy desk that I hammer everything on over there (any big strong men want to volunteer?). And I need to decorate (at least new curtains and a very large area rug to cover up that hideous yellow carpet).  I think I'll enjoy finishing setting it up and decorating as much as I'll enjoy working in it.


P.S. Don't for get to enter this week's giveaway! $50 worth of tutorials from Gailavira Jewelry

Shelter from the Storm

You know how it is when you are so tired you can't see straight and all you want to do is close your eyes and go to sleep. But then, the moment you close your eyes you see something painted on the inside of your eyelids. You open your eyes and try so hard to remember what it was. You grab a piece of paper and a pencil as quick as you can. You touch the tip of the pencil to the paper. And suddenly, you don't remember what it was you saw.

 I don't know about you, but usually, that's how it goes for me. This, however, is one of those few times when the image stuck with me. Not just long enough to get a piece of paper. Not even just long enough to do a rough sketch of what I thought I saw. I never even had to look at the sketch to finish this necklace. I was worried I wouldn't be able to figure it out, but as soon as I picked up the Amethyst crystal point it all came together.

This is actually the first serious piece of jewelry I've made in a while. Over the summer I just had too much going on around me to relax and play with wire. Kids running around, places to go, things to do, all of that stuff. So, on the first day that my daughter went back to school  I did nothing else. This necklace took me all day to make, but it felt like only a few minutes from start to finish.

I wanted to make the clasp so that it followed the flow of the focal, but I didn't want to make it overbearing. I settled on a woven hook style clasp with coiled tendrils matching the ones on the pendant. Both the pendant and the clasp are accented with tiny Purple Velvet Swarovski Crystals.

You can find this piece for sale in my Etsy shop, Gailavira Jewelry


Don't forget to check out this week's giveaway.

Tutorial Giveaway!

This week I will be giving away $50 worth of wire wrapped jewelry tutorials from Gailavira Jewelry to one lucky winner! This giveaway will start this evening and run through Friday August 31st.

Login to Rafflecopter using the widget below to enter.  

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Winner will be able to choose from the tutorials available on my web-site or in my Etsy tutorial shop.
Gailavira Tutorials
http://gailaviratutorials.etsy.com

My First Published Tutorial!

I've just had a tutorial published in the Spring 2012 Issue of Wirework Magazine!

I've had a couple of smaller tutorials published in a book before (3 very simple projects in Denise Peck's book, Wire Style 2), but this is my first tutorial to be published in a magazine. I'm really excited about this one too. This is the kind of work that I love to do. Lot's of graceful curves, weaving, coiling... And, since it's more or less a collection of techniques it's a very versatile design. The tutorial gives you specifics for one size of stone, but it's easy to adapt this design to lots of other shapes and sizes.



I even got a small spot on the cover!

You can order the magazine from Kalmbach Publishing here: http://www.kalmbachstore.com/wrk120301.html.

Who Makes the Bigger Statement, Your Jewelry or You?

When I design jewelry for other people, I have to keep in mind the type of personality the person who will be wearing it has. Are they confident enough to pull off big and bold designs? Or would something smaller and a little bit understated be less overpowering to them. I often see people wearing jewelry that just does not suit them. It's not that the pieces they chose don't look good on them, just that they themselves get lost behind those pieces.

Growing up my mother always told me, "You wear the clothes, the clothes don't wear you". In reality, this has nothing to do with the clothes, but the attitude of the person wearing them. All too often people wear certain clothes thinking that by wearing them, they will project the attitude they want to have rather than who they really are. The problem is that when you do this people only see who you obviously aren't.

People often ask me how to choose what jewelry best suits them. I tell them to pick what they want to wear, whether it's clothes, make up, shoes, jewelry or anything else, the same way they would pick their best friends. Would you be friends with someone who made you look like you didn't know what you were doing? Or someone who tried their best to take everyone's attention away from you so that they could be in the spotlight all the time while you stand there lost in their shadow? Probably not. So don't let what you wear do that either.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't wear big, bold, outrageous fashions. It's fun to wear and fun to see other people wearing. Just make sure that above all of that, you are the one being noticed.

New Tutorial! Hyacinth House: Woven Donut Wrap

I finally got around to finishing another tutorial. This is one that I know several people have been waiting much too long for! To those of you who have been requesting this one since the original one was posted last year, I am so sorry to have made you wait this long. Hope you enjoy it.

 

In this lesson I will teach you how to make a unique and extremely versatile woven wrap for a donut bead. The instructions show a very basic version of the pendant, however there is no end to the ways to alter this design.

The cost for this one is only $4. Right now it is only available on my web-site, http://www.gailavira.com/tutorials/index.html.

This pendant is the original “Hyacinth House” pendant and was inspired by a song from The Doors by the same name. This lesson teaches you how to make a pendant that is using just the base design for this pendant, however there are tips at the end of the lesson to help you come up with ideas for several variations of the base design.

Just Practicing

After seeing a question someone posted in a jewelry forum about setting small stones (and the link she posted to metalworkers.org) I was inspired to try it out for myself. This stone is no where near as small as the ones she was asking about though. I decided to try the technique with a larger stone so I could work out the basics of it. Now that I have an idea of how to do it I'll start trying it out with smaller stones when I get the time (I have some 4x6mm rhodochrosite cabs that I'm dying to try this out on!)

This one obviously needs a lot of work. There are a too many mistakes to count,and a couple spots look quite sloppy, but it feels like a good starting point to me.

Since this is only a practice pendant (and not for sale) I decided to use craft wire for it instead of sterling silver and gold filled wire. The stone is a dark Amethyst crystal point.
 
  

Web-Site Redesign Is Finally Finished!

For several months now my web-site has been down so I could re-do it (again). Not that it actually took me that long to do all the work. In fact, once I got started, it only took a few days to do it. I'm just one of those people who tends to put things off for as long as possible. Last week I finally decided enough is enough and made myself get to work. Today, after working an hour or so here and there over the past week, I got sick of it still not being done. So I planted my rear end in a chair and for 9 hours straight I did nothing but work on getting my web-site done. Hey, it was either that or do my taxes. What would you rather do?

Well, after 9 hours today (13 hours if you include last week's work), my brain is mushy and making crackling popping sizzling noises as though it's sitting in a frying pan full of hot grease, my hands hurt so bad I can barely finish typing this, my joints are so stiff they feel like someone stuffed cotton into every one of them and my rear end is a little bit flatter and 3" wider than it was this morning. But, *cue angels singing "Hallelujah"*, my web-site is DONE.

The best part about the re-design is I had always been putting off offering instant downloads of tutorial purchases on my site because I was too lazy to do the work to add it. Since I was doing all this work anyway, adding the instant downloads really didn't add much extra work at all. So now anyone who doesn't want to wait for me to email them the tutorials they buy, (like they would when buying from my etsy and artfire shops), can order from my web-site and get their tutorials almost immediately! Who doesn't like instant gratification, right?

Here's hoping I don't get bored with it any time soon (like I usually do). I really don't want to have to do all that work again! lol


BTW, here's the link: http://www.gailavira.com