Register for the CHAINED launch party!

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CHAINED has been a labor of love for almost 2 years and it’s high time we celebrate it!  Join us at the Lillstreet Art Center on Saturday December 11th from 1:30-5:30pm for refreshments, mingling, shopping, and general partying-down.  

We are asking all guests to RSVP so we know how much food and wine to get. *grin*

REGISTER NOW!

We can’t wait to see you there!


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Register today so you can…

* Enjoy complimentary wine, snacks and cake while you shop and mingle
* Meet and connect with other maillers from the community
* Ask the Author: Rebeca will be on hand to answer your questions all evening, with a dedicated Q&A session beginning at 3:00
* Purchase Blue Buddha Boutique’s exclusive line of CHAINED project kits
* Buy finished CHAINED jewelry –  perfect for holiday gifts!



B3 at the One of a Kind Show THIS WEEKEND!

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We are so pleased to be one of the over 600 artists participating in the One of a Kind Show & Sale again this year.  Rebeca has already been rocking it out at our booth (#8087!) selling her unique handmade chainmaille jewelry.  However, the B3 goodness happening at the show doesn’t stop there.  Rebeca’s Mystical Waterfall necklace will be working the runway this weekend.  Also, you can stop by our booth on Saturday at 1pm for a special artist demonstration – Chainmaille: From Chain-Link Shirts to Spectacular Jewelry.  Stop by and feel free to ask any chainmaille question you’d like.  Wondering about colored rings?  What are the best projects for beginners?  Do you want to know which of Rebeca’s projects have gone terribly wrong?  Just ask!  The demonstration is only supposed to last 20 minutes, but Rebeca will stick around to answer your questions until they have all been answered.  You can also take this opportunity to check out her new book, CHAINED.

Longtime student Lisa and her friend rocking out the One of a Kind Shopping bags.

Finally, we were all super-excited when we saw that Rebeca’s Poseidon’s Embrace (which has been popping up on the One of a Kind website, ads, and eblasts galore) is also gracing the OoaK shopping bags!  All this exposure is obviously exciting for us at B3, but we mostly excited about the opportunity for us to continue to position the art of making chainmaille jewelry alongside other highly respected art forms – right where it belongs!

See you at the show!

We have a winner! Two, really!

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Every year at the DIY Trunk Show, we have a Guess How Many Rings contest at the Blue Buddha booth. It’s always a ton of fun for me to see what people’s perceptions of quantity are. It is clear that people tend to overestimate…often by a lot. :-)

You can see the target jar way to the right of our display:
chainmaille jewelry

For those wishing to play at home before you read the answer…these rings are size P16, and yes, there is a layer of black rings at the top, the same height as the other colors.

This year, we had two winners! One guy I remember, because he came up and very carefully studied the rings, and took a good couple of minutes to do some calculations based on the volume of the container. Very detailed! I am not sure what method the other person used, but the end result was the same. So congratulations to Paul K. and Maria S. – your guesses of 12,000 rings were closest to the actual number of 11,100 and you each win a gift certificate worth $25.

And now for the usual mathy geekiness surrounding the guesses (I have too much fun with numbers, sometimes):
Range: 742 – 800,000
Mean (average): 34,044
Mean w/o 2 highest and 2 lowest: 5,913
Median: 4,764
Mode (most popular guesses): 12,000
I find it interesting that the Mode was also the winning number!
Runners up: 10,133 (off by 967), 70,000 (off by 1,200)
Most people underestimated – of all the guesses,80 % were less than the total.

Mystical Waterfall

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I did not plan on submitting something to the fashion show at the One of a Kind Show this year, simply because with everything else going on, I didn’t think I’d have time to craft something worthy. However, when they invited me to submit something last week, I couldn’t say no. So over the holiday, I whipped up a piece with size X12 (12ga 7/16″ / 11.1 mm) anodized aluminum. There are about 325 rings in this necklace. This batch of iridescent gunmetal came out just perfect, and I can’t wait to make a few more pieces to wear in the booth!
chainmaille necklace by Rebeca Mojica
The photo isn’t the best, but I literally had about 2 minutes to shoot it, before I had to pack it up and get it in the mail. And now, to run back home and make more jewelry! All of my scale pieces sold at the DIY Trunk Show, so I’m making dozens more by Thursday. Whew!

Kits for CHAINED now available!

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make chainmaille jewelryBlue Buddha Boutique has made it easy to get started making all the pieces in CHAINED by creating kits for every project shown in the book. We’ve got 31 different project kits ready to go, and we plan to release more in the coming months. Simply visit our CHAINED kits page and shop by chapter and page number — With one click, you can add to your cart everything you need to make the project exactly how it appears in the book. There are also one-click options to add all the projects from a chapter to your cart at once, or even all the projects from the entire book!

See a variation in the book that you want a kit for? Let us know which kits you want us to create next by leaving a comment below, voicing your opinion on our wall on facebook, sending us an @reply on twitter, or joining the discussions on our soon-to-debut forum.