Grand Central is upon us!!!

We have been very, very busy lately, making more jewelry than I can believe. The Grand Central Terminal Holiday Gift Fair opened on Saturday, and it is the most intense, exciting show of the year. It includes a month (December) of living in the city, which is a different world for us. Our sublet will begin at the end of November, so logistics this month are a bit tricky. Our friend Barbara is very kind to us, offering her company and apartment on the upper West side whenever we need a place to stay. She even feeds us! :)

I have tons of pictures for you now (not all good quality, but good enough for our purposes here). Click on any picture to enlarge it. Here I am in our GCT booth:



We have prepared some special pieces for this show and I do hope you will come visit us if you can make it to the NYC sometime before the end of December. If you see something that interests you here, feel free to contact me about it. Let's begin...

A whole bunch of cufflinks and rings:





Here they are in the booth. Notice those loaded charm bracelets.



This one has 19 different American coins, going back to the 19th century. I LOVE this bracelet.





Here, you can see the front, and then the back, of a heart dot dime ring (I made the ring band from a quarter). You can click on the pictures to make them bigger.





Here's a very special bracelet, one of a kind. It's solid 18k gold. I made the original pieces from 6 half dollars. You can see the different half dollar images in the pictures of the back. It's 7 3/4" long.













Here's a one-of-a-kind necklace, made with handspun wool yarn. There are five of my designs on this one.



And the back:



An Indian Pushout Dollar Pendant:



A one of a kind oxidized silver bracelet with a $5 gold piece (the coin is on the inside of the dome, and the other side is a circle):



A Half Dollar and Quarters Sampler Bracelet in which each piece is different:



I am very excited to have entered this time of year and I hope to see you soon!!!

Dan Takes On Two Apprentices!

We are getting ready for the big show in NYC. My mom is on a much-needed vacation to Aruba with her childhood friends, after working around the clock on logistical stuff. Dan has been working on nickels and pennies for hours every day (last year we didn't have enough), and I have done my share, too, creating a few new pieces (including an Acorn Quarter Pendant) and putting together hundreds, if not thousands (or millions, hee hee), of pieces. :)

It's a lovely season here in Woodstock. The Fall has been vibrant and crisp. Yesterday Dan was doming nickels outside on a big rock.



The impact of the hammer causes the rock under the tool to turn to powder, thus leaving an indent that reminds me of Native American cooking rocks. It's pretty neat.



He has taken on two apprentices!



I took pictures in the studio recently when I was making some new pieces, but they didn't come out well enough to post. Sorry about that.

I hope you are enjoying this fine October!

Today in my studio...

Hi, you. How about a little view into my studio?



See that chaos? I love it! Every once in a while, Dan or my mom will get fed up with the mess and clean it up. I hate that! In my mess of tools, I know where every single thing is. Like Tom Thumb, I can reach into the pile and pull out what I need.

People often ask how we get the pieces concave. Well, here are the doming tools:



Dan and I worked in there today while Joey was at preschool and Linus was playing with my parents. We listened to music (my favorite CD - Dan's). Dan was working on Indian Head nickels. I made a piece that I've been wanting to make for quite a while. It's a Leaf Half Dollar Pendant. I wasn't sure what it was going to look like until just before I started, when I looked around on the ground outside my studio for interesting leaves. I decided to go with a really simple design.



Here it is in progress, with one side already cut off:



I sanded off the eagle side, leaving the lady side intact. I cut off the tip of one of the scraps (see the scraps on the right side of the following picture) and soldered it to the top of the leaf, then soldered a half-ring onto the back. I created the veins in the leaf.



And a close-up, taken outside:



It was a productive day. :)

Garlic

Hi, Readers! People have told me at shows that they've been reading the blog. Thank you! :)

This past weekend was the Garlic Festival. It was our first time doing it. We'd heard there would be 60,000 people. I made 99 garlic pendants. Well, the weatherpeople thought it was going to rain all weekend long (and people believed them), so attendance was way down. It was actually a beautiful weekend. We ended up doing fine with the regular line, but we have quite a few garlic pendants left. If anyone has any ideas for me on how to market them, please let me know! There's a picture of the garlic pendant in the previous blog post.

I have some jewelry pictures for you. The first picture contains my process coins. You can see, from left to right, the evolution of a Flower half dollar bracelet piece. As always (though not pictured), the coin is visible on the back.



Here are two new Indian necklaces, each made with a Pushout Indian Dollar. The first is a 3-piece necklace with 2 Indian Head pennies and the second is a 5-piece necklace with pennies and nickels.





Here's a 5-piece necklace with a Morgan dollar, 2 Walking Liberty half dollars and 2 Standing Liberty quarters.



Finally, here's a picture of the Yin and Yang pendants, cut from a single half dollar, to be shared and worn by two people.



We'll see some of you at Rhinebeck this weekend! :)

New Pieces!

Hi. This week is CRAZY (two kids with different preschool schedules, making tons of jewelry everyday, some social engagements for us and/or the kids, etc.)! I JUST finished a couple of new pieces and I would like to share them with you! This pendant, which I love, is made from a half dollar (heart) and a dime (flower).



This one is made from a half dollar (heart) and a daisy (dime). I'll put two jump rings in it and connect it to link chain, so it'll be like my three- and five-piece necklaces, but one piece (well, two pieces in one).



I'll take this opportunity to unveil the Garlic Pendant, created for this weekend's upcoming Garlic Festival in Saugerties. I made it from a half dollar which, as always, can be seen on the back of the piece.



That's all for now.

:) Jessie

Monday's thoughts

Hi, friends. It was a beautiful weekend at Lyndhurst! The weather was perfect and the turnout was very nice.

Here are some word dime pendants. This picture doesn't show all of them, but you get the idea. The ones we do are: BELIEVE, CREATE, DARE, DREAM, HEAL, HOPE, IMAGINE, LOVE, REMEMBER and TRUST.



Now, I'd like to show you some GORGEOUS tourmaline beads I got last December while we were living in NYC for the Grand Central Holiday Fair. I got them in the jewelry district. Apparently, the man I bought them from had been sitting on them for 10 years and he brought them out because I asked specifically for very special tourmaline beads. These beads are in the shape of the actual crystals, unaltered, but drilled the long way and cut and slightly faceted at top and bottom. They are all different and I think they are spectacular. I am planning to do some one-of-a-kind pieces with them, incorporating my design pieces, in time for the Grand Central show this year. If you would like to commission something with these, please let me know.




I want to thank all of our customers. We have dedicated ourselves to the artisan lifestyle, and we are so grateful to be able to thrive on it.

Show Schedule

Hello. Tomorrow we’ll set up at Lyndhurst, but today I am not looking at jewelry, so I’ll post our show schedule. Before that, here are a couple of pictures of our house, which we bought on April 30th. It took us a long time to sell our previous house, and we are very happy with this one.



We might like to have a studio sale at home some time. Until then, here’s our show schedule for the rest of 2008:

Lyndhurst, September 19-21 in Tarrytown, NY

Garlic Festival, September 27-28 in Saugerties, NY

Rhinebeck, October 4-5 in Rhinebeck, NY

Wilton Historical Society, November 15-16 in Wilton, CT

Grand Central Holiday Gift Fair, November 15-December 29 in NYC

We are hoping for good weather this weekend!

:) Jessie

High Winds in Columbus on Sunday!

Hi. :) I had wanted to post this earlier (last night), but our hotel had no power or internet connection due to high winds!


Hello to Eileen from the wind shelter and hello also to the couple who helped us with our tent! A HUGE thank you goes to Michelle, of Stella Shows, for her help in getting us to our taxi. In spite of the tornado-like ending, I loved this show. Stella Shows people are wonderful! They are good Samaritans and they treat people right. We had good experiences with the Country Living folks, too. It was a great show for us.

We had a particularly nice time yesterday with three women: (left to right) Tara, Tina (mom) and Nicole. Here they are, wearing their pendants that they bought from me.


Something funny had happened the day before with Nicole. She was trying on the Circle Quarter Pendant and, when I handed her the mirror, I told her that she had a really nicely shaped head. There were about 15 people in front of the booth at that moment, and, thinking on her feet, she said something along the lines of “I have been waiting such a long time for someone to notice!” Everyone laughed (I probably laughed the loudest). Thanks for the fun conversations (not to mention the tip about the chocolate covered frozen cheesecake), girls!

Speaking of funny things, someone said something today that I cannot believe I hadn’t either thought of or heard before (we have been doing this business for 10 years). A woman was deciding between the Indian Nickel Pendant and the Buffalo Nickel Pendant (two sides of the same coin). She asked her guy what he thought, and he suggested, with a chuckle, that she “flip a coin.” I LOVE THAT!

I have three jewelry pictures for you today. The first is what we call the Mother and Child Necklace. It’s a Heart Dollar and a Heart Dime, together on one chain.



Here’s the display of silver dollar pendants: Circle, Circle Dot, Sunflower, Push-out, Daisy, Lady and Heart.



Here’s a rare and fun thing, the puzzle necklace. I cut the five pieces out of two half dollars. Each piece has an interesting coin image on at least one side. All five pieces make the square pictured. If you take out the tiny square, you can make a different square from the remaining four pieces, as well as lots of other shapes (like a Tangrams game).



This coming weekend (Friday, Saturday and Sunday), we’ll be at Lyndhurst in Tarrytown, NY. If you’ve read the blog, please let me know. I’m pretty excited about it. :)

Pictures from Columbus!

Hi! You can find pictures of my jewelry at http://www.madefromcoins.com and you can e-mail me anytime at jessie@madefromcoins.com - I hope you enjoy this post. It's chock full of pictures. Only about 40% of my jewelry line is on my website. We keep meaning to photograph the new stuff, and we'll get to it eventually (hopefully this Fall). Until then, I decided to start today with some photos here. I ask you to forgive the picture quality, as I took these photos at the show today, with my phone's camera!

I love the Country Living Fair! People come from all over America to shop here. I have been making these fun, loaded charm necklaces and bracelets lately. This necklace has a silver dollar, as well as a whole bunch of half dollars, quarters and dimes, all hearts.


This bracelet has 3 half dollars, 6 quarters and 10 dimes, lots of different designs.


At the Country Living Fair this weekend, THREE women had me make them gourmet custom charm bracelets while they walked around. Here's a picture of one of them:


The woman who commissioned this one really loves it. She came to the show with her two daughters all the way from New Mexico. I so enjoy interacting with the people who wear and love my jewelry.

In addition to the loaded charm bracelets, the bracelets made from Indian Pennies and/or Buffalo and Indian (the reverse sides of the same coin) nickels are very popular this year. Lately, my mom drills the holes in the pennies and nickels, my husband domes and polishes them, and I put them together. They are generously sized and are loved by both men and women .


Just yesterday, I added these bracelets to the line. I crocheted them from special yarns and used Mercury Dime buttons. The blue and green one is handpainted, handspun merino. The white one is pure angora, handspun from hand-raised bunnies! It is softer than you can imagine. The brown one is exotic, luxurious bison down, combed and collected from American buffalos. In addition to the Mercury Dime button, it has a buffalo nickel (pictured, and the dime is on the other side of the wrist). A photographer from Country Living magazine came around today and took a picture of these for the Country Living website. I love these.

Here's a piece I added this year. It's a 1958 Ben Franklin half dollar on the back. I call it the Clover Rose.


We added these this year, too. They are the Heart Heart Pendants (interesting name, huh? Hee hee).


Here's a shot of the necklace I wore today. It has a Lady Dollar Pendant in the center, on black cord with six Mercury Dime beads (only two are pictured). It also has a clasp made from a half dollar (also not pictured). It's about 24" long.

Here are three small group pictures I took of our display today.




I hope you've enjoyed seeing these photos!