FEATURED PRODUCT FOR OCTOBER – Size D20

The Featured Product of the Month for October is our size D20 – 20g 1/8″ (3.2mm).  These small rings are incredibly versatile and work in a number of weaves.  They are also available in every metal we sell making them a great choice for experimenting with color and creative customization. 

Visit the D20 Weave Ideas blog post for more than a dozen weave ideas to get you started or start buying quickly and easily with our Ring Picker tool – see every metal and color available for this size in one place!

Here’s how the contest works:

Make a project which primarily uses our featured product**. The project can most definitely use other rings and components, but the featured product should really be the star of the piece. The project does not necessarily have to be brand new to be submitted – if you have some amazing piece you made last year hanging around that uses the featured product of the month, share it!

Take a picture of your project and post it to our page on Facebook. Give your piece a title and Make sure to write something like “This is my submission for the Featured Product Contest!” in the little box that says “Say something about this photo…” when you upload it to our wall.  Please note: upload your photos from your computer directly to be sure they will show up on our wall.  We’ve experienced some technical difficulities with folks uploading from other devices so it’s just safer that way!

Submissions will be accepting between the 1st and 15th of every month so make sure to get your project posted in time! Please limit your submissions to 2 per person.

Get Votes! Submissions will close on the 15th of each month at which point the B3 Staff will choose our favorites. The top entries will be eligible for voting through a survey which we will post to our blog as well as our wall on Facebook. If you are one of the finalists, feel free to share the link with friends via email, Facebook, Twitter or any other means.

Voting will close on the last day of the month.

That’s all it takes! We will award the top voted finalist each month with a $25 B3 Gift Certificate and will feature YOUR project in a special blog post and possibly even future B3 ads** to inspire fellow chainmaillers all over the world.

**Please also note that while the project is not required to be made from Blue Buddha Boutique rings, any winning projects that use primarily rings from another supplier or rings made by the artist will not be eligible for posting on our blog or use in our ads.  We do this to prevent false advertising.  We do not want to create the image that we sell a product that we in fact do not.  Thank you for your understanding.

FEATURED PRODUCT FOR NOVEMBER – Glass Rings

Coming up in November we’ll feature our shiny glass rings.  B3 Ambassador Kat Wisniewski loves inventing new ways to integrate glass rings into her work and we can’t wait to see what you come up with as well.

STAY TUNED TO OUR BLOG FOR A WEAVE IDEAS POST

chainmaille · contest · featured product of the month

It’s been far too long since we’ve gotten to dive into the mind of a great chainmaille artist and we are thrilled to have Spider of Silverweaver and Spiderchain as our next contributor.  Spider has been a longtime friend of Rebeca and Blue Buddha Boutique – basically, we adore her.  Not only does she produce incredible chainmaille supplies, great projects, and some awesome instructional DVDs, but she’s just an overall great lady.  When you consider all the things Spider does (on her website she says “I’m Spider, the founder of Spiderchain Jewelry. I’m the designer, webmistress, accountant, shipping department, and janitor. I coil, cut, count, weave, choose, email, anodize, troubleshoot, and teach.”) it’s easy to forget that she has another full time job – mother.

Our “Ask an Artist” article with Spider will focus on her experiences with balancing work and life – something we feel so many of our readers can relate to.  Read on to learn more about Spider and find out how you can ask her your questions about “doing it all”…and keeping it all balanced.

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Spider is a chainmail artist currently living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her childhood was spent in Mendocino, a secluded community of artists on the California coast, though eventually she followed her left-brain to Boston to join the technology revolution, receiving a degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT. After several years as a computer geek she discovered that her passion lay not in technology, but in art and today she spends her time discovering new and beautiful ways to weave metal.

Spider’s passion for making and teaching others how to make chainmaille got her started with her own business, however as many small business owners can attest to, the day-to-day dealings are often less glamorous (in Spider’s case, fulfilling supply orders, answering customer questions and keeping up with inventory) than the passion that got them started.  For Spider, the challenge to manage her time stems from the need to keep up with her business each day knowing that when her second grade daughter comes home from school, it’s all about homework, cuddle time and swim lessons.

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It’s your turn to pick Spider’s brain about balancing work and life. We will be accepting questions until Saturday, October 15th! Here’s how to get your question to Spider:

1. Write it in the comments section at the end of this blog entry
2. Post it to our wall on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/BlueBuddhaBoutique
3. Tweet it to us using @BlueBuddhaBtq: http://twitter.com/BlueBuddhaBtq
4. Email it to me at community@bluebuddhaboutique.com

Learn more about Spider:
Finished Jewelry Website: http://www.silverweaver.com
Supplies, Kits, and Instruction: http://spiderchain.com

ask an artists · chainmaille business · silverweaver · Spider · Spiderchain · work life balance

It’s true, we’re already knee deep in planning and prepping for The Bead&Button Show 2012 (crazy, right?!)  Part of this planning involves looking at customer feedback and making changes to improve customer satisfaction and experience at our booth.  One area that is always a bit tricky for us to navigate is the customization of our kits at shows.  The limitations put on us by the fact that (as much as we might want to be able to) we can’t tote our entire inventory around the country also puts limitations on some of our most popular kits such as Glass Caterpillar, Bicubix Blocks, and many more.

That’s where you come in.  We want to know how you feel about being able to customize products at shows (you don’t have to be a Bead&Button Show aficionado to answer the survey) and get some of your feedback on our ideas for future solutions to our limitations.  Thank you in advance for your time and thoughts – we sincerely appreciate your feedback and can’t wait to come up with just the right way to provide these products to you at shows.

TAKE THE 5 QUESTION SURVEY!

Bead&Button Show · chainmaille kits · customer survey

We subscribe to a great service called “Help a Reporter Out” (HARO) which connects reporters and other writers/publishers with folks who fit the bill on the stories that are interested in writing (highly recommend this for all you small business crafters out there!)

This post came through the other day and we felt it might be just perfect for sme of you folks!  Check it out and be sure to let us know if you and your craft end up being included in what sounds like it will be a very cool book!

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Summary: SELLING ART, CRAFTS, VINTAGE ITEMS ONLINE
Name: Steve Weber Book (print)
Category: Business and Finance
Email: query-1jir@helpareporter.net
Media Outlet: Book (print)
Deadline: 7:00 PM EST – 30 September

Query:

For a book on how to create and sell handcrafted and vintage items online, I’m looking for sellers active at Etsy, eBay and other online venues. I’m looking for avariety of people who are passionate about this, either as a one-person part-time business, or a full-time enterprise with employees.

The book will feature traditional arts and crafts like knitting, woodworking and jewelery making, as well as the practice of recycling/upcycling used items into new fashions.

Please describe:

1. How you got started with your craft or line of merchandise
2. How your business has evolved since you stated, and how
you’ve managed the tough economic climate.
3. Your creative or item-scouting process.
4. How do you attract customers and get repeat business?
5. What percentage of your business is online/craft
show/consignment/store? What are the trends?
6. What is your procedure for valuing/pricing your items?
7. Please provide links to your online shop or Web site.

Since these contributions will be used for a photo-illustrated printed book, photos are encouraged. For people who will be featured in the book, I’ll respond with follow-up questions. If you are not familiar with my line of e-commerce books, please search Amazon.com for “Steve Weber” or email me for samples.

book · HARO · help a reporter out · selling handmade · Steve Weber

At least a couple times a month, customers ask us: “Why are there no white aluminum jump rings?” The simple answer is that it’s not possible.

It seems like it should be possible because coloring aluminum is done by dye, and there are white dyes. However, these dyes cannot be used in anodized aluminum. When Jen and I visited our anodizer, he walked us through the process, and explained why this is so.

First, let’s look at what anodizing does to the surface of jump rings. The electricity in the anodizing process makes the metal porous, thereby preparing it to receive dye. Below are two images zooming in on the surface of the anodized metal.

To be more specific, anodizing creates an oxide layer that has roughly one million microscopic pores on the surface of one square inch of aluminum. If you’d like to get your nerd on with more technical information about this process, SubsTech has lots of great articles (open-source!) on their website. The image below, from their page on anodizing, shows how the color is added to “fill the holes” in the surface of anodized aluminum.

Now that you know a little more about the technical side of anodizing, let’s get back to our original question. It’s important to understand that not all dye molecules are created equal, and some colors are bigger than others. Blue molecules have no problem filling in the holes.

Red molecules are bigger than the blue ones, but they still fit, no problem.

Unfortunately, when we get to white molecules, they are so large that they do not fit into the holes created by the anodizing process! There’s no way to squeeze a white molecule into the pore!

Another way to look at the size comparison of molecules:
Imagine a pore the size of a basketball net.
A gold dye molecule is the size of a golf ball.
Blue dye is about the size of a tennis ball.
Red and black dyes are about the size of a baseball.
Scientists haven’t been able to get white dye molecules smaller than beach ball size, which is too large to fit.

And that, fellow maillers, is why there is no white anodized aluminum.

Now some of you may think that you’ve seen white anodized aluminum. It’s true that our anodizer can get a color fairly close to white, by etching the aluminum and then sealing the surface just as would be done after dyeing colored anodized aluminum. But the color most definitely is not a pure white, and can vary from a muted grey to a dirty off-white. If you see someone selling “white” aluminum, they have most likely used this acid-etched process.

Blue, red and white molecule illustrations by Artie Keefe and Erik Watson. (more…)

anodized aluminum · Anodized Aluminum 101 · anodizing · chemistry · dye · molecules · white aluminum · white anodized aluminum