A little pre-holiday goody – a new refill kitpack: The Half Persian Two Color Bracelet in Yellow and Rose Gold Filled.

I finally gave up trying to find a commercially available clasp similar to the one Urban Maille uses and made my own. And according to the questions I’ve been getting about this one, it’s about time.

This bracelet is massive, weighing in at almost 2 troy ounces and the finished width is 10.5mm. The kit makes a bracelet up to 9.5 inches. You can find it at the bottom of the Kitpacks page.

We will be closed from December 23rd through January 3rd for holidays and inventory. Of course, you’ll still be able to place orders during this time and when we start shipping again on January 4th, we’ll ship them out in the order they were received.

Today is the busiest shipping day of the year and things are starting to slow down a day or two so please be patient with your mail carrier.

If you were a member of the Creative Wire Jewelry forum many years ago, you will remember Maaria, whom Aislyn dubbed “The Queen of Beautiful Chains”. I have searched but I can’t find the exact date that she posted a picture of some unique rings that she had made; I believe it was 2003 or 2004. That image has stayed with me all these years and I finally got a chance to try one of my own. Here is my version of the Maaria Ring:

I used 12ga Dead Soft Half Round for the ring, 14 22ga/2.25mm rings for the byzantine section and 4 20ga/2.75mm rings for the connectors.

If you would like a little more Maaria inspiration, you can visit her web site. Don’t worry that you don’t understand her language (Finnish), just click the links, then click on the pictures. Her work is gorgeous!

All of the pre-holiday orders are gone, the banana pudding is in the fridge and the pumpkin bread is in the oven: I am as close to ready as I can be.

Charlie & I both wish you a Happy Thanksgving!

We are going to close Thursday for Thanksgiving but we’ll be back making rings and shipping orders on Friday.

Some of you will love it and some of you will hate it but we are going to change our packaging. This week we will ship out the last of the little gold tins. We are switching to cotton filled boxes that are made from 100% post-consumer recycled content and are recyclable, if your community has a cardboard recycling program like ours does. They can also be re-used as gift boxes to put your finished jewelry in or as storage boxes to organize your ring collection. *s*

This is just one of the things we are doing to try to not be such energy/resource hogs: The new office building is double insulated and has a ceiling fan to help lower heating costs in the winter, plus in the spring and fall, I’ll be able to open the windows and turn on the fan many days instead of running the air conditioner.

We have also just had a well drilled in anticipation of next year’s garden and mini-orchard projects. We live in an area where cold, clear spring water is plentiful, so we’ve tapped into it and not only will we be rinsing your rings in it, but we’ll also pipe it to the garden to keep the veggies growing. The blackberries are already in the ground and eventually there will be half a dozen apple and peach trees and about that many raised garden beds. Just enough to keep the 2 of us in home-grown food for most of the year.

Speaking of rinsing your rings, we designed it so that the run-off from that will be used to water a flower bed behind the office. I haven’t decided what to put in there yet – probably roses, since they like lots of sudsy water.

We are constantly trying to “live lightly” and are working on becoming more self sufficient; all of these changes are progress towards those goals.

goldie

I have been so busy that I totally forgot to update everyone after the move. After 4 emails in 3 weeks asking if everything was okay, I decided to catch up with everyone at once: All is well at Golden Maille. We resumed shipping orders the week after the move, working out of the house while the new office was being built. We whittled the business equipment and supplies down to the barest minimum and crammed it (almost) all into 2 bedrooms.  Parts of it overflowed into other areas, like ring-drying racks in the guest bathtub, but it worked out quite well.

The weather slowed down the construction project considerably. There were several weeks were it rained every single day. Once the building was dried in, that wasn’t always a work stopper, but you can’t haul sheetrock in a pickup truck in the rain, so we still had to work around the weather forecast.

And then my own personal contractor (Charlie) got Lyme disease. His case was mild and he’s fine now, thank goodness.

The office is finally finished and we’ve moved everything out of the house. The only things that I haven’t gotten around to unpacking yet are non-essentials like the 30 or so plastic tackle box thingies full of beads.  And I don’t think I’ll be needing them anytime soon. (anybody want to buy a bunch of beads…)

And now for the promise part – lots of changes are on the way. A whole new web site with the ability to set up an account that will save your shipping and billing addresses, along with your past order history is in the works. Some days I make great progress on it and some days nothing, so I won’t even try to predict when it will be ready. I may be asking a few of you to be testers when I get closer to the launch date.

Another project in the works is all new packaging – we’re going green. This one will probably happen in the next couple of weeks and I’ll tell you all about it then.

But the change you’ll see the quickest is one that many of you have been asking for: 16 and 18 gauge rings available in 1/2 troy ounce sizes. I’ll be adding these over the weekend. If they don’t show up for you by Sunday night, try refreshing the page or clearing your cache.

Hope you all have a great weekend!

I know  – this was supposed to be our forever home but it just hasn’t worked out that way. Right now, we have a chance to move closer to my family, so we’re going to do it.

To accomplish this, we’re going to close for a 2-week vacation (!) from April 27th through May 8th, then open back up in our brand new office.

All orders placed by midnight on the 24th will be shipped before we move and then on May 11th,  we’ll start shipping the orders that were placed while we are closed.

I’ll tell you all about the new place and post pictures when we get re-settled. Right now I am going to spend a few hours planning the new office and production area – I don’t know how I can improve on what I have right now, but I’m going to try to make this one even more perfect.

We’ve shipped everything we possibly can and locked up the workshop for a few days. Tomorrow morning we’ll load up & head over the river & through the woods to grandma’s house for a couple of days.

It’s been a great year – thank you all for making it one of our best.

We hope your holidays are the very best this year!

goldie & charlie

Hi Everyone!

We have a request from someone looking for maille classes in New Jersey, so if you teach, please leave me a comment below with the wheres and whens. Thanks!