fresh start

I finally decided to do it.

Dive in, take it all apart and start over.  

What you see here is my entire wholesale sample collection.  Well almost all.  Since I've had my samples back I've used a few pieces here and there to fill orders ... but for the most part this mondo pile of jewels represents a major part of my life since 2005. 

Once I took everything off the sample boards and piled it up to take a snap, I proceeded to dismantle the whole shamoozie ...

And in case you hadn't noticed, that's a butt load of silver.  Next I ran everything through the tumbler to brighten it up and give it some fresh juju.

Then it was on to sorting tumbling media from silver.  Et voila ...

Like I said, a mega pile of silver.  

Then it was sorting it into my little plastic bins and getting ready to dive into putting together a new, updated, fresh interpretation of my wholesale collection.

I'm pretty excited about starting over and I'm still very much in the middle of the whole process, but progress is being made.  

It's been a long long time since I was at all motivated to work on this side of my business.

Along with the production side of things, I've made a bunch of new, one-off pieces.  I had thought I would get them listed on Etsy today, but got completely bogged down with another project. 

Ah well - here's a sneak peek at what's to come .............

Two pieces using the 'shard' components from the samples - 

this one with a lovely trio of peridot colored sea glass

and this one with shards of crystal quartz ...

Then here's a couple of pieces using the petal components.  

The first one with a major stack of tiny Chinese turquoise slices and wonderfully flat slate river pebbles ...

and this one with a stack of white sea glass and the slate river pebbles ...

And of course, I'm still obsessed with my ocean color palette ... hugely obsessed with those colors and these tiny gravelly pieces of silver.  I would love an unlimited supply of metal clay to just make these all day.  

Then I decided to bump things up a notch ... well, kind of a big notch.  This one has 27 tiny silver beads inspired by the shells and coral I used to find on the beach in Port Townsend.  

Worked in with the silver, a yummy stack of sea glass, Roman glass and my own, hand-formed lapis nuggets along with some cobalt trade beads ...

and the Pièce de résistance
this one is so over the top amazing, it makes me giddy ... she's 48" long and has virtually a whole gem show's worth of treasures ...

So I'm hoping I'll get pieces listed this weekend ... we'll see.  That and the continuing re-creation of my wholesale collection.  Looks like I'm gonna be a busy girl.

Have a lovely weekend!

l i g a - kvk