LOULOU Feature!

We're very excited to have one of our necklaces in LOULOU magazine's June issue! LOULOU is Canada's shopping magazine. Look for us on page 40, Eco-Buzz, featuring earth friendly products (you may have to look hard, because its a tiny picture, but exciting nonetheless!).

Handmade Wedding Bands

This custom wedding band is one of a pair made for a great Nova Scotian couple who will be married in July. They designed the rings themselves, preferring simple sterling silver bands with the curved design to represent their love for the ocean, as well as each other. See the ring come to life below.


1. The sterling sheet (0.8 mm thick) was measured to ensure the right ring size, and cut with a saw. A’s ring size is 7, so the silver needed to be 56.5 mm in length.






2. The silver strip was stamped with the couples' initials. These are new stamps, a finer font than my other ones, just got them from Rio Grande.






3. The small hole was drilled in the band to allow the saw blade to be inserted. A curved line was cut freehand down the length of the band, taking care to stop before the stamped initials.





4. To prepare for soldering, the edges of the band were sanded so that they met flush, tightly enough so that you don’t see light through the joint.





5. The band was fluxed, to clean the joint and to prevent firescale from forming on the silver. I solder with a Smith’s Little Torch, using propane and oxygen. To solder a joint like this, you want a bushy flame with a soft hiss, blue with a bit of orange. After soldering, the ring was pickled in an acid solution to clean it.




6. To make it perfectly round, the band was then put on the ring mandrel, and hammered with a rawhide mallet. Now it looks more like a ring.





7. The ring was then sanded with increasingly finer grades of sandpaper (from 180 to 600) to remove scratches. To give it a mirror shine, it was then polished with silicone discs. To finish it off, the ring was tumbled with stainless steel shot for fourty five minutes.


And there you have it, a sterling ring to last a lifetime.

Home Sweet (you know the rest...)

Its always exciting to find pieces of sea pottery with images, and houses and castles are my very favourite. And bittersweet, because we're trying to sell our home right now, which isn't my favourite thing to do. It probably doesn't help that what would be a dining room (if we were civilized folk) is my studio, crammed with our sea glass finds and floating in silver dust. This piece of sea pottery is bezeled in fine silver and hangs on an 18" sterling silver snake chain. If you'd like to see more pics of this, visit the listing in our etsy shop (and buy my house please).

New in our Etsy Shop

I had fun making these rings- there's something about hammering metal that just makes a girl feel good. A set of three hammered sterling silver stacking rings, one with a bezel set piece of soft green sea pottery rescued from a Nova Scotia beach. The rings may be worn together or separately. They will fit size 7 1/2 to 8. If you'd like a set of rings in a different size or with a particular colour of sea glass, we'd be happy to do a custom order for you.

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=23550836

TransCanada Team Easter Egg Hunt

Spring has Sprung! The Easter Bunny hopped over to the TransCanada Etsy Team and left some eggs behind!So we decided to host the first ever TransCanada Etsy Team Easter Egg Hunt. 29 shops are hiding 20 eggs and one person will win a $15.00 coupon* to redeem at any of the participating Etsy shops. Click on the link below for the fun details.


Happy Hunting!

http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=5343947

Congrats to MeLLie for winning the earrings! Hope you enjoy them.

Indienorth- Win Free Earrings!

Indienorth is a Canadian indie business collective who is running a giveaway for a pair of our Sun on the Water earrings. Check out their blog here- and maybe win :)