It’s the second day of “Show Off Your Maille” week and the pretties walking around our studio today are all by are lovely customer service gal, Aimee. Yep, not only did she make the two piece she’s wearing today, but she also crafted the bracelet our shipping guru Erik is sporting.
We have declared this week “Show Off Your Maille” week. Each day, we’ll be wearing some of our favorite pieces of maille (made by us and others) and posting pics of what we wore to work here on our blog. Today’s pics feature two of our amazing order processors, Lisa and Artie. Both of them are super-crafty in so many ways – it’s not surprising each of these pieces were made by them.
We have officially named next week as, “Show Off Your Maille Week”. The entire B3 team is planning to wear our favorite chainmaille pieces (made by us or others) to work everyday. We’ll post photos to our blog each day, showing off what we wore.
Help us in our quest to increase chainmaille awareness by donning your favorite pieces every day next week. Post photos of yourself wearing your favorite pieces to our wall on Facebook. We’ll make one final blog post at the end of the week that will feature some of your pictures! The more people see maille, the more they’ll want to make it so help us spread the addiction….er…..LOVE for the craft! *wink*
Submissions for October’s Featured Product of the Month Contest are closed, and the B3 team has cast their ballots to determine the finalists…..which means it’s time for YOU to cast your vote to determine the winner. Folks this month were challenged to create a piece that featured our size D20 rings. We had so many great submissions and the B3 team had a heck of a time narrowing them down! Thank you to EVERYONE who submitted a piece – we were blown away by them and we can’t wait to see what everyone comes up with next month! Voting will close October 31st at 5pm CT. Voting is only allowed once per computer so choose wisely!
To share the survey, we recommend you copy the link to this blog post and use that in any emails, blog posts, or social media posts you’d like to make about it (we’ve noticed some weirdness in the past with sharing the link directly – it sometimes like to bump people out of voting that haven’t already.)
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Some of our most popular jewelry kits (and favorite modern chainmaille projects!) use components such as seed beads, crystals, and glass rings. The question has come up from a several of our customers, “How do I clean pieces that use delicate components?” We think this is an excellent question – one everyone might benefit from hearing our answer to. I posed this question to two of our designers who use these components in their B3 designs as well as their own lines of jewelry. The following is their expert advice.
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Advice from Kat Wisniewski, designer behind several of our kits including Glass Caterpillar and artists behind Elemental Art Jewelry.What are the concerns with taking care of pieces that use glass and crystal rings? Glass is super easy to take care of and can be tumbled over and over again in a small barrel jewelry tumbler. Crystals that do not have foil backs can be tumbled as well. If it has a foil back, it will scratch and deteriorate over time, kinda fading in various spots. Lemon juice cleaning may be OK for foil back crystals, but I’ve never tried it. Lemon juice works great with glass and non-foiled crystals!
What do you recommend when it comes to cleaning these pieces? I recommend tumbling with burnishing compound and shot over every other possible method. 15-20 min is fine, rinse, dry with blow dryer on cool setting.
What do you recommend to keep these pieces clean to begin with? Air tight zip locks with Anti- tarnish tabs for each individual item–yes I actually suck the air out! Then I put items in a larger freezer zip lock and suck all the air out. Then I put all the items in a box and keep in a cool and dry place.
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Rebeca has started using more crystals in her designs for B3 like Coiled Crystals, Beaded Zig-Zag Byzantine, and Crystal Ring Byzantine. She adds this bit of advice:We’ve tumbled plenty of pieces with crystals, and they have been just fine. However, it would still be possible for a crystal to get hit with a piece of shot in JUST the right spot at just the right (er, wrong) moment, and shatter. It’s never happened to us, so that should be reassuring to everyone, but still, it is possible. I recommend not letting the piece get too tarnished to begin with so that the time spent in the tumbler is minimized. Do maintenance with soap and water as often as possible.
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