Our booth design has been evolving over the last few years, here is an old booth shot (from an indoor show):

From 2007 Frosty's Fair

The silhouette is my partner in jewelry.  Last year, we decided to move to shelving for the most part and this is what we slapped together:

From 2009 Downtown DC Holiday Market

Better right?  Cleaner, easier to see, easier to navigate, but very busy, and the bamboo blinds as a backdrop didn’t work as well as we had envisioned.

For Arts On Foot we had a little more time to plan and decide how we wanted to present ourselves.  We had to change some things a little bit but overall how we planned it was how it looked:

From 2009 Downtown DC Holiday Market

The green is really fresh looking and the dark espresso brown is a nice accent and combination with it.  Our silver pops nicely against both colors, which is nice.  It’s really hard to find a color that works for silver jewelry.  We got rid of the large table in favor for a much smaller one just big enough for our mirror, business cards, mailing list book, and my humongous laptop, which we use to process credit card sales.  We incorporated two “pedestals” fashioned from stools with trays velcroed to the tops for our pendants.  Overall, the booth was much cleaner and easier on the eyes, and there was little of the dreaded “butt brush issue”.

birds and butterfly necklace components

I’ve been going through a bird phase ever since last fall – I can’t help myself, I love them!

necklace components and one bracelet set

My new favorite though are these peacock feathers! I may have to keep one of them… There’s a nice deep blue sapphire in the eye of the feather on the right.  I’ve also really been excited about geometric shapes lately and I did a whole series of them for necklaces and earrings.  The three oval bracelet components in the lower right corner of the above photo are textured with my piped silver design as shown but on the back they are textured with the spiral texture that you see in the rectangle components to the left of them.

butterflies and flowers

geometric shapes

modern Etruscan shapes for necklace

modern embellished Etruscan shapes for necklace

These elements are finished on the other side with my piped silverwork (like the oval bracelet components).

square elements for necklace (with tanzanite)

These elements are textured with a paisley pattern on the reverse side.

I’ve also made 65 new pairs of earrings in similar motifs and I have sanded and filed over half of them (43 pairs). Tonight I hope to fire at least two loads and finish firing tomorrow. Then I will tumble everything during the rest of the week and begin making actual jewelry out of these components over the weekend.

mehndi teardrop amulet necklace

This is one of my amulet necklaces – I choose a selection of items in a motif that tell a little “story”… maybe it’s a color story or a story about geometry… this particular necklace is an exotic story!  I set a marquis faceted blue sapphire into the fine silver clay and fired it in place and wrapped a sky blue zircon at the top.  I accented both little silver drops with a deep blue kyanite briolette.  I love the royal colors of the blue with the exotic design.

Oval Lily Cluster Necklace

This necklace has my favorite little “flip flop” mini cornflake keishi pearls in an unusual shade of baby blue.  Mixingcolors with these pearls was challenging as the shade of blue has a subtle cast of green in it but it didn’t go with my usual blue/green stones that I tend to favor when I make things for myself.  I used chalcedony and iolite in the necklace and in the cascade I used additionally some gray sapphire and mystic blue quartz.

Granulated Disc Necklace

Do you ever make something and think “I hope this doesn’t sell because I want it”? That’s the case with this necklace I made two years ago.

spiral textured oval earrings with quartz briolette

I made a series of these, from which I was going to make a bracelet, but then the show I was at, which was multiple days, I was selling out of earrings and I didn’t have any more fired pieces that I could make earrings for so I scratched my bracelet idea and decided to make multiple pairs of earrings instead – so now I have 4 pairs of earrings made from these little spiral textured ovals. I do think that they are pretty cute!

In addition to our pure silver jewelry we will be introducing our new work in bronze and copper and showing a selection of our Christmas ornaments in the new materials.

A few days ago I picked up my jewelry that I had left with the chair of a local cooperative school and found, to my pleasant surprise, that she had made several more sales for me!  I also made my second Etsy sale from my detash store late last week.

Next:  Photographing my jewelry for Etsy!  I’ll get there I swear!  I’ll do it!