Fridays Fabulous Photos - Spring is back

The last couple of weeks I've been working inside most of the time, so I didn't notice what was happening with the weather, or even with the whole world, to be honest. This afternoon I was heading home by bus and when I was looking through the window, I suddenly saw it! Winter is coming to an end! There were spring flowers everywhere!! Even the sun was shining and I instantly got into the spring mood. The result is a lovely collage of sweet spring blossoms.

What is your favourite season?

Love,

Ivanna

blossom tree, girl with flowers, blossom, pink flowers

Wednesday's Words of Wisdom - We are the music makers

When we first heard this famous quote in the film adaptation of Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, we thought this was just another one of Roald Dahl's incredible truisms. However, this phrase happens to be the beginning of a wonderful poem by Arthur O'Shaughnessy, Ode!

We are the music makers,

And we are the dreamers of dreams,

Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

And sitting by desolate streams;—

World-losers and world-forsakers,

On whom the pale moon gleams:

Yet we are the movers and shakers

Of the world for ever, it seems.

Above, you can see the first verse; you can find the full poem here. Don't you think it's absolutely beautiful? We still think the first two lines are the most illustrative - the most renowned anyway -, but now that we know the entire poem, they seem to mean even more. We sure can't wait to get to work and make something out of this!

xx

Lisa & Ivanna

Lisa's Juicer

Homemade juices seem to be very hot and happening the last few months, and I have been responding frantically on anything juice-related on numerous blogs and forums. However, I completely forgot to blog about my own juicer! I've had this baby (a Princess VitaPure 202041) since November, and I don't think I have ever been more in love. It juices anything - hard, fibry stuff like carrots, beets, and ginger, but also the softer citrus fruits, mangos and pears it has no trouble with. It does seem to have some issues with squeezing all of the juice out of the softer fruits and veggies, but I found that alternating between hard and soft pieces while juicing, solves this problem pretty much entirely.

Monday's Musical Delight - Playlist #27: Get On Your Dancing Shoes

For today's Musical Delight, I planned to make a playlist with modern soul songs, but since today is such a happy day for me (my boyfriend and I are celebrating our 9 year anniversary!), I decided to postpone it. Soul isn't particularly cheerful after all :p So, let's celebrate the start of this wonderful week by dancing our way into it to these joyful tunes! Enjoy!

xx 

Lisa

Weekly Inspiration Post - Hippie Bohemian

As we said before, we recently spent a Sunday afternoon with a Kristel Veenstra, a sister of a friend of ours, who happens to be a photography student. We spent the whole day at her house to photograph our jewelry. As we did or tried to do with all our Weekly Inspiration Posts so far, we tried to come up with combinations as diverse as possible. Only now, we actually wore them. We tried to create combinations that were not only diverse, but also realistic - this is how we would wear our jewelry ourselves. Of course, if you have different ideas of how to style or combine our jewelry, we would love to hear from you! From now on we will try to show more of how to wear the jewelry instead of just combinations on a white background.

The collage below clearly shows the diversity we were talking about. It's summery, bohemian, hippie, colourfula complete mengelmoes of textures and materials. We really like to combine different materials, which is really not that hard if you stick to a certain colour palette, in this case brown, pink and turquoise.

How do you combine your jewelry?

Love,
Lisa and Ivanna

Fridays Fabulous Photos - Individual

Two weeks ago I started with my internship of Veterinary Medicine and I have already met a lot of new people. My days are very busy, I am learning a lot of new things in a short period of time and I get to see different techniques that are used by the veterinarians that I work with. In just a couple of months I will graduate and at the moment I am focusing on developing my own methods. With all the possibilities and different approaches that I observe it is sometimes difficult to create your own ideas. This does not only apply to my internship, but actually to a lot of things. That is why I chose to make a collage with lovely pictures of  'one' being in the centre. These pictures show individuality, freedom, and maybe also a bit loneliness, because that is what you sometimes get through when developing yourself to being a unique person. But that isn't always a bad thing as long as you know that you are not completely on your own! :)

xx Ivanna

tree island, bus on road, girl in grass, tree

Weekly Inspiration Post - Crisp Spring Colours

Since today was such a wonderful, sunny day, we went for a nice stroll on the beach with our friends. It really was a lot of fun to be together again, the five of us, on such a a peaceful Sunday afternoon, and the magnificent blue skies and crisp sea breeze made this day absolutely perfect! It's quite absurd to realise that most parts of the world are still struggling with harsh winter weather, because we really seem to have skipped winter and moved right into spring. Not that we're complaining :p We can't wait for the actual spring to set in, to delight us with colour!

This bright set contains a blue Fresh Spring Leaves, a blue Royal Princess, and a Ménage À Trois with a tiny heart charm.

Lisa & Ivanna

Friday's Fabulous Photos - Happy Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day! We hope you all had (and will continue to have!) a wonderful day. Personally, we don't really celebrate Valentine's Day with our boyfriends - mainly because we sort of celebrate every time we see them, but also because we're just not very fond of the expensive gifts and cheesy Hallmark cards. However, there are lots of other ways to celebrate your love for each other: go to the movies on a Thursday afternoon, cook breakfast together and enjoy it in bed, show up with an enormous bunch of handpicked flowers, go for a long walk in the woods or on the beach... Anyway, you get the point.

Do you celebrate Valentine's Day?

Have a lovely (and loving) day!

Lisa & Ivanna

walk, music paper flowers, candy hearts, flour heart

Wednesday's Words of Wisdom - Maya Angelou

Only two days until Valentine's Day! To be very honest, neither of us really does anything romantic on this day, despite both of us having a boyfriend, but we do think it is nice to have a day that evolves around one of the most beautiful things in this world: love. (Of course, we're not just referring to romantic love here, but also love between friends, siblings, etcetera) After all, isn't this what life is all about - loving each other and making each other happy?

What is "love" according to you?

Lisa & Ivanna

 

PS: Don't forget our Valentine's Discount Code (link), which is valid until February 14! If you're living in the Netherlands: if you order today, you will receive it in time for Valentine's Day! 

Monday's Musical Delight - Playlist #26: Love Songs

With Valentine's Day around the corner, I thought it fitting to make a list of love songs. Since most of the (pop) songs throughout history are about love, I had to make a thorough selection :p You might notice most of the songs are pretty old, which has mostly to do with my fondness of old music. Also, most of today's love songs seem to be very cynical and bitter, and often seem to address unanswered love and broken hearts, wheres the older songs are more happy and uplifting! Or maybe it's just my blurred vision :p Anyways, have a great week, and I hope these songs with put you in the mood for Valentine's Day!

Love,

Lisa

PS: What are your favourite love songs?

Weekly Inspiration Post - Subtle Mix of Colours

Today's set is a combination of subtle colours. Due to the use of pastels, the set seems mellow and dreamy, whereas the deeper brown and teal add a little more spice. We enjoy making "unlikely" combinations - mixing colours and styles that you wouldn't normally expect, and we think this set does exactly that. This assemblage contains a teal Little Peace, and a lilac tourmaline Royal Princess, which are both from our older collections. It also holds the fairly new white Misty Dreams, and a dark brown Ojibwa Princess with a mint green tassel.

Love, 

Lisa and Ivanna

PS: In case you wish to order any of these, make sure to be quick! We still have a 14% discount in our shop ^^

Shop Update: Behind-the-scenes - Handling Orders

Not really a shop update, but since we've been so busy with our shop lately, we thought it would be nice to talk about our "behind-the-scenes" process a little more! We love pretty much everything we do for our blog and shop (except for writing Etsy listings, which is kind of a drag :p), but the thing we love most is handling orders. Because ultimately, that is what it's all about: making our jewelry, and trying to make our customers happy. So, today we will share a little insight in our process of handling orders!

Firstly, when we receive an order, we immediately start creating and/or adjusting the items. In case of bracelets, we might have to adjust the size, or create a new bracelet altogether. Sometimes the customer can choose from a variety of colours or charms, and we will make and adjust the items to the customers desires. Since we often have just one piece per design in store for pictures, we usually have to make the ordered item from scratch. This takes a bit of time, but personally we like that we can really put our heart and soul into that one piece!

Monday's Musical Delight - Playlist #25: Guitar Songs

Since I've already made two playlists with Drum Songs, I figured it would also be fun to make one with songs that I like to play on the guitar. I haven't really played guitar in quite a while, but since I put a set of new strings on my acoustic western, I really felt like playing again! Mind you, I'm not the next Jimmy Page or something, so the songs I play are rather simple, but they are fun nonetheless! And if you don't want to play along, they're quite nice to listen to as well ;)

Have a great week!

Lisa

Valentines Day Discount

Dear everyone, we know Valentine's Day is almost two weeks away, but we think you can never start stocking up on presents early enough. After all, how wonderful is it to show your loved ones how much you care about them, with nice presents? However, we are well aware that everybody is still financially recovering from the expensive December month, so we decided to give you a discount code for our very own shop! You can get a 14% discount on all items in our shop by using the code:

Valentine14

This code is valid from February 1st until 14th.

Happy shopping Valentine's Day!

Lots of love,
Lisa & Ivanna