Valentine's Discount

Good news for the lovebirds among us: until February 14 we offer a 14% Valentine's Discount in our Etsy shop! If you use the code "Valentine2015", you get 14% off of all your purchases (except of course the shipping costs). 

Of course, you don't have to buy these as presents - there's nothing wrong with buying something pretty for yourself ;)

Summer Break

As you may have noticed, there is not much going on here at the moment, mainly because we have decided to take a summer break. Ivanna and I both went through some important changes in our lives, which took up pretty much all of our time. I'll try to summarize it:

Over the past months, Ivanna got her degree in veterinary medicine and moved in with her boyfriend, with whom she is currently working as a volunteer in a veterinary clinic in Greece for the next four weeks. I also took an important step in my romantic life by moving in together with my boyfriend quite recently, so I'm still practically in the middle of a move. Oh, and I will also be heading to Greece later this month - the similarities here are quite eerie... I'll be on a different island than Ivanna though, but that doesn't matter, because I now live like 2 minutes away from her :)

As far as technicalities go, we know our blog is a bit of a mess right now, and we humbly apologise for that. We were working on some new ideas, but got interrupted by all this other important stuff, so it's kind of inbetween everything right now (just like us :p). Our shop is still open, so no worries there! Although, do note that we will both be away between August 1 and 23. This means that our shop will remain open, and you will still be able to place orders, but you will have to wait until after August 23 for your order to be shipped. 

In the meantime, we may post a little something now and then, or we may not. We wish you all a fantastic summer, and we'll definitely be back next month!

Lots of love, 

Lisa

King's Day Bracelet!

As you may have noticed (especially if you live here in the Netherlands), it has been almost a year since Willem-Alexander was inaugurated as king. This does not only mean that we have a new monarch; it also means the end of Queensday, and the beginning of Kingsday!

Last year we celebrated the former Queen's birthday with our Queen For A Day bracelets and earrings. Of course we want to celebrate the King's birthday as well by the introduction of this unique handmade bracelet. This piece of jewelry is made of four glass beaded bracelets in the colours of the Dutch flag and banner, and a silver-coloured crown charm. This cute limited-edition bracelet is now for sale on our webshop! 

Especially for you guys we would like to offer this bracelet and the rest of our jewelry with a 10% discount! This discount lasts until Wednesday April 22nd. You can get 10% off if you fill in the following code with your order:

KING123

If you want to wear it on King's Day, make sure you order on time! :)

Love,

Lisa and Ivanna

PS: If you want to see us and our jewelry in real life, we will be joining the freemarket in Vlaardingen on April 26, as usual! ;)

King's Day bracelet, Queen for a Day bracelet, Queen for a Day earrings

Men's jewelry now online!

Last Sunday we proudly announced that we finished our men's jewelry collection. This was also the moment that we were going to start focussing on making all the item listings on Etsy, which is really a lot more work than you would think. In order to get a good view on the product for the customers, it is important to add a detailed description to all items. And of course, since this is why we wanted to make jewelry, describe our thoughts and ideas on the separate pieces by explaining the used symbols and adding matching quotes. You can imagine that this can take a while, but in the end this is what we want to do and what distinguishes us from commercial jewelry production. 

We also asked Lisa's boyfriend very nicely to pose with our freshly made jewelry so that we can show you what it looks like on someone. Below we created an impression of the whole collection. More close-up photo's and how-to-wear photo's, and of course all the unique items, can be found in our webshop. 

Love,

Lisa & Ivanna

New: The Men's Collection

Instead of our usual “Weekly Inspiration” post, we’ve got some very good news to share with you today: we have finally finished our men’s jewelry collection! Maybe you remember our little Moodboard that we posted a few weeks ago to show you what we were doing? Well, this is the result: 

We tried to make this collection as diverse as possible, using lots of different materials, and mixing different styles. The thing that binds this all together, though, is exactly the concept we started with: “adventures”. We wanted to make a strong, masculine collection, that is easy to combine, and makes the man wearing it seem like he collected the pieces himself from all over the world. As a matter of fact, you could say that this collection is one great “journey”! 

We start our journey with these anchor and compass necklaces. We love using symbols in our jewelry, and we couldn’t think of anything more appropriate to symbolize the idea of traveling than these!

Obviously, when you travel the world, you also come across more “primitive” places. The kind of places where cavemen are still hunting down mammoths with spears and arrows. Those places don’t exist anymore, do they? Well, perhaps we just needed an excuse to use arrows :p

Because we love arrows so much, necklaces alone weren't enough; we also made a sturdy arrow bracelet. The rough leather, chunky beads, and big clasps also match the "primitiveness" we were talking about.

Instead of merely using black and dark brown, which seems way too common in today’s men’s accessories, we tried using lighter materials as well, such as cork, bone, and wood. The light colours and natural materials, give the pieces a summery and beachy feel. Think of the tropical islands you pass on your journey, pirates, and hidden treasures.

Of course, since black and dark brown are still the most popular colours among men, we figured we’d best do them a favour. After all, there is something incredibly manly about these colours, especially when they’re combined with these rough pyrite beads, and cool charms. Imagine tribal warriors and brave knights and the like ;)

The next couple of days we’re going to retreat into our imaginary caves and devote ourselves entirely to the tedious task of writing our Etsy listings for these new items. So, we’re gonna get ourselves some more coffee!

xx Lisa & Ivanna

Men's Jewelry Moodboard

We have had some requests from our male friends to make more jewelry for them as well, instead of just their girlfriends. Of course, we have made some men's jewelry before (like our leather Dead Or Alive bracelets, our Squaretacular Bloodstone, and Rocking Charms), but now, we wanted to dedicate ourselves completely to the task of designing an entire collection of men's jewelry!

The obvious thing for us to do, would be to make the same items we made for our female customers, only darker and sturdier, but we think our boys deserve more than just these cliché pieces. We always try to create from a natural angle, using as many pure materials as possible, and trying to capture the colours and textures of nature, while combining them with emotions and symbolism. And who says men can't wear this type of jewelry instead of just black leather and skulls? In order to assemble our ideas, we created the moodboard you can see below. Of course, this is just a little taste of what we have in mind, but since we've already started working on the new pieces, we can assure you it will look great!

Lisa & Ivanna

PS: What kind of jewelry do you like for men?

Photos by us, the Hemp Beadery, Allthedumbthings, and Sayila

Apologies and announcement

Dear readers, we want to offer you our humble apologies for the lack of Fabulous Photos last Friday. The last few days have been so incrediby busy, we simply forgot to post. First of all, we spent our Friday night together, eating sushi and partying at a Fratellis concert. Which isn't much of an excuse, but we felt like we needed some actual non-work-related fun :p And secondly - and most importantly - we have been working very hard on a giveaway! We are still working on the details, but keep your eyes open - we'll keep you posted!

Lots of love,

Lisa & Ivanna

Even more new bracelets!

After our little Wish Collection, we have some more new items in our Etsy shop:

- Misty Mountains: a soft pastel bracelet with glass and gemstone beads. As we mentioned in our Friday's Fabulous Photos post a few weeks ago, we desperately wanted to make something inspired by mist, and this is the result! What do you think?

- Ojibwa Princess: With the story of Hanging Cloud in mind, we wanted to make something that captured the native American look. Hanging Cloud was important woman in the famous Ojibwa tribe (one of the largest groups of Native Americans in the North of Mexico). She was the daughter of chief Beautifying Bird and a full warrior - the only woman allowed to ever become one. She defended her village after her father died and therefore she is legendary among the tribes of the Northern Plains. We made the bracelets a bit more playful with colourful tassels to express femininity, whereas the thick suede emphasises her strength.

We still have loads of materials and drawings, so even more new items will be added soon!

Love,
Lisa and Ivanna

Yay, new items available!

As you may or may not have noticed, some of our new items are finally availabe in our shop! Together, these new bracelets are the Wish Collection. The collection is created by our idea that it is important to have something to wish for in your life, something to hold on to. We made a colourful collection, which is great to mix and match. You can make your combinations, and even the individual bracelets, very personal by choosing your own colours.

The collection entails 3 different bracelets:

     - "Wish Upon A Star": a delicate, beaded bracelet with a little star charm at the clasp. This

       bracelet is available in six different colours.

     - "If I Can Have One Wish": a lovely wax cord bracelet, with a little "wish" charm and a tassel

       at  the clasp. The wax cord is available in  six different colours, and the tassels in eight,

       which means there are 48 possible combinations!

     - "One Simple Wish": a simple wax cord bracelet (available in 7 colours) with a wishbone

       charm in the middle.

You can find all of these bracelets in our webshop!

What do you think of our Wish Collection? Which bracelet is your favourite?

Love,

Lisa and Ivanna

      

This is our new blog!

So, here it is: our new and improved blog! Our new style hasn't changed all that much, but we did make some minor adjustments: we've introduced some new fonts, refreshing bright colors and a cheerful, clear layout.

What else is new? We will make sure to blog on a more regular basis. Instead of writing long articles every few weeks on topics that are not really related to each other, we decided to write shorter articles on stuff that really, really, really inspires us, and are more coherent.

Boring? Nope. There is still plenty of variation, in the form of recurring posts:

• Monday's Musical Delight, in which Lisa will continue to make playlists, but this will now happen on a weekly basis (YAY!)
• Wednesday's Words of Wisdom. Because we love quotes, and lyrics, and poems, and want to share our most precious ones with you.
• Friday's Fabulous Photos, which will consist of beautiful photos of pretty much anything.
• We will keep posting our Weekly Inspiration as well, every weekend.
• And on top of all this, we will also enlighten with our Shop Updates every now and then, and post some personal stuff, if we feel like it :) This contains posts about our Personal Style, Things we Love or Places we've Been. 

What do you think of this new style? Any tips or comments?

Love,
Lisa & Ivanna

Blog Under Construction :)

As you may have noticed, we have not been very active on this blog the last couple of months. This summer has been very hectic for the both of us, in terms of study, work, internships, etcetera - and of course a much needed vacation here and there -, so we figured we'd better spend the very little time we had together on our shop, instead of our blog. 

However, now that the summer is coming to an end, and everything is starting to settle down again, we decided to call these last few months of radio silence a long, unannounced summer break, and make a fresh start :)

This fresh start does not only mean that will be posting more regularly, it also means we are going to make some changes. Even though we love this blog, we are quite unsatisfied with the irregular posts and the fact that most of the articles seem to be all over the place. So, we are now in the process of figuring out how to make our blog more coherent, and how we can make sure that we can keep blogging on a regular basis. Of course, after months without any blog-related creativity, our minds are flooding with new ideas, so it's taking quite a while to get everything going. But we're sure we will be back on track soon!

We'll keep you posted!

Love,

Lisa & Ivanna

Queensday Bracelets

Since this year's Queensday is extra special, we decided to launch our very own Queensday bracelet in our Etsy shop: Queen For A Day! You may have seen it in our shop already, since it has been for sale for a while now. However, thanks to several requests, we also made a pair of cute, matching earrings :)
 

Supplies

For our jewelry shop, we have many supplies. Not only do we have a lot of different beads and charms, but also tools, cards, envelopes, bubble wrap and of course the finished bracelets. It is difficult to store all of this in one place; we have tried different chests, containers and boxes, but non of them were quite suitable. Fortunately, Lisa still had a wooden Ikea cabinet 

and after a little redecoration, it turned out to be the perfect storage for all our stuff. In this way, everything is well organized, easy to find and stays dust-free.

Creative Day!

Today, Lisa and I met at my place to let our creativity flow and make some nice, new items for our webshop! 

Some time ago we came up with the idea that we wanted to use leather cords as a new basic material for our bracelets. It fits perfectly with the rest of our collection because of its natural appearance and moreover, it is very suitable for men bracelets! We also ordered some nice beads on Etsy, where we found an enormous assortment of ceramic skull and peace beads in all kinds of colours. 

"Working" at Ivanna's

Dear readers of our new little blog,

since we had both spent some time away on holidays, and unfortunately had to spend a lot of time on our studies as well, we had not worked on our jewelry shop for a while. Therefore, we decided to meet at Ivanna's and work on some new stuff. We did not spend a whole lot a time on that, though, because we got a little destracted.(This happens a lot!) The reason for this is that we had been working on this blog for a couple of days and were really excited about this. So, while we were talking about it yesterday, we thought it would be fun to make some photobooth-style pictures of ourselves to add to the “About Us” section.