Sunday 23 January 2011

love is in the air

i have been busy this week making some new treasure for the website for valentines day. i have managed 3 new bracelets so far. it's amazing how time consuming it is to try and figure out what looks best where! although i love using lots of color and kitsch images and sparkle, one of my favorites is a bracelet i made with all vintage 1960s/70s "love" charms (perfect for your girl). a lot of these style of charms have been re-made in recent years from vintage tooling, but the ones i used are original.

a few years ago, when i was back home in the states, i was at a swap meet and met a woman who had bought the entire stock of an old warehouse. in that stock, among other things, were boxes of these vintage charms. it was an absolute treasure trove! i bought two boxes without even really looking through them and years later, i am still using them. a lot of them were made to be engraved and have spaces incorporated into the design. some of the charms were actually already engraved. my favorite is a heart that has two blanks and says "......loves......". engraved in the spaces are "steve" and "mohammed".
i wonder if they will still be celebrating together this valentines day...

Tuesday 11 January 2011

and so it begins....

i am thinking right now that i might totally enjoy writing this blog. it's going to be like the diary i always promise myself i'll keep every drunken, bleary-eyed new years eve, when a little too much booze makes me insistent about changing my ways in the year to come. all those promises i make myself while lying on the bathroom floor, (sometimes to the amusement of my boyfriend) about how i'll be more organized, how i'm going to use moisturiser every day, i'm going to keep my house clean, but most importantly... how i'm going to document my life. i can't even estimate how much i've spent over the years on beautiful, kitsch, retro, shabby chic, (whatever took my fancy) notebooks and new pens ready to take on that diary. sadly, the inclination lasts about a week... two weeks tops and then i all but forget i even started it.

i envy every girl i have ever known that has consistently managed over the course of their life to keep a journal. i long to be able to sit in bed on a rainy afternoon and just absorb pages ( which i know would be totally cringey, but i don't care) of what i was thinking when i was 16, who i was hanging out with, what i did on specific days when i was 18...20. i want to relive, in detail, the stories and experiences that got me to where i am now. but... because i haven't managed to keep ANY of my new years resolutions...EVER... since i was a teenager, that's impossible.

being very good at writing letters, but completely crap at ever getting to the post office to send them, i am actually quite lucky that i do have drawers and boxes with years worth of letters, cards, and scraps of paper i have written intending to send to friends and relatives, but never got around to it. so in some essence, i do have a kind of diary. i keep EVERYTHING and actually have receipts from the first grocery shopping i did when i moved out on my own when i was 17. i find it hard to throw away boarding passes from a trip i took 15 years ago. sometimes i will just keep a scrap of paper or an envelope from a letter because my dad wrote my name and address on it.

so, i am really excited about it being a new year and this time instead of buying a new book to keep my story in, i'm taking the technology of the year 2011 and running with it! i'm a little worried about my inability to grasp some of the technology, my mom is 70 and she has more blogs and internet savvy than i will probably ever have, but i am going to keep this years resolution. even if it kills me.