Rare 19th century British Victorian crystal beads in a variety of settings — note the different bead caps.
All jewelry, in fact all engineered structures, have one thing in common; they are made up of a collection of elements. What is an element? It is a single repeatable item — in the case of JAL jewelry, this consists of a series of beads on a wire, to wit:
Form a loop at one end of the 4″ long .20 gauge copper wire.
Wrap the end of the wire to finish the loop.
Press the cut end of the wire deeply into the wrapping so it doesn’t catch on anything.
Thread on a 4mm round copper bead.
Add a spacer bead.
Add a bead cap if wanted, with the hollow side toward the main bead.
Old Gorby showing a customer some wrapped meteorite pendants which had attracted her attention.
We had a slowish day at the fair, but managed to squeak by with a total of $420 in sales, mostly from fellow vendors, with a few wandering shoppers here and there. Cost of the booth was $30. If you bring in ten times the booth fee, you’re doing well these days, they tell me. The beautiful display stands were hand-built by Wayne, and they fit four standard jeweler’s pads precisely. Continue reading →
Heisnerize Your World with this amazing technique.
It’s very simple to keep your prices fair to you and to the customer, but you’ll notice that people will try to beat you down just to see if you’ll give way, and most jewelry crafters do give way and lower their prices down to almost nothing, just to see the customer smile and nod and walk away, knowing they’ve had you.
The thing to do to prevent being beaten down for a bargain price is to establish your prices in the first place, and keep them rigid — HARDEN your price list, and KEEP THE FAITH.
What I mean is, look at the sign that announces your prices, point to the sign, say to the customer, “Those are my prices. I’ll give you ten percent off if you buy this today.”
Special fair prices are okay, but PRINT THEM, don’t tell the prices verbally, because then they can change — the customer sees vulnerability there and moves in for the kill, so you must anticipate this by PRINTING your price list and if possible, photographing a few models with your creations and using them in a flyer, announcing your great SALE prices, but that’s as low as you go.
If you leave yourself wide open as a target for bargaining and discussion and rationale and mental one-ups and emotional jumps, you won’t have a good experience. “It ain’t me that decides the price” is the concept that you hold in your mind as the sale proceeds. Never be the one who determines price, or you’ll lose the ballgame.
FEAR of REJECTION is what causes you to lower your prices when you KNOW you shouldn’t, and it’s a fact that lowering your price won’t change the sale. It’ll happen if it’s going to happen, and it won’t if it isn’t. If the sale isn’t “Meant to Happen”, it won’t happen, and if it is MEANT to happen, it will. Stay confident, even if you aren’t. Never let them see you sweat.
Sounds horribly Existential, but it isn’t, and that’s not the right interpretation of Existentialism anyway. It’s impossible to believe it, but there’s nothing YOU can do to alter the FACT of the sale, determining whether the sale happens or not … but wait … there IS something you CAN DO, if you’re ABLE to do it, which is doubtful.
Polychromed lid from one of my coffins, c. 1300 B.C.
The IDEAL Gemstone size-range for JAL Stone Age Jewelry is 5mm up to 10mm. Lightweight stones or beads can be as large as 14mm, but it’s not recommended. Can smaller stones be used?
Smaller high-grade expensive Gemstones can be used by doubling the stones in the vertical plane, or adding them as dependents, drops or loops. Two small stones add up to more visual impact than one larger stone, even at the same carat-weight, not sure why.
The ONLY acceptable drill-hole sizes for JAL Stone Age Jewelry is what can fit on a .16 gauge or .20 gauge COPPER wire. Larger drill-holes don’t necessarily help, and very large drill-holes can make the bead or the bead arrangement unstable and wobbly.
When you work in copper, it’s your work the customer is buying. When you work in silver or gold, you get the same pay for your work, but you must also sell the precious metals, and the customer NEVER understands that they are getting back a cash rebate in the form of precious metals easily exchanged for cash at the current melt-value.
You asked for it, you got it. Panniy Michele asked if we could produce them, and we can. This is the result, and if you’re a reseller, it’s only gonna set you back $35 a pair. If you know your beads, add the costs up, and you can see what a bargain you’re getting at this wholesale price. My Copper Dorje Earrings are meant to retail for an easy $69.95.
Stay tuned for more. I’ll be inserting prayer scrolls into earrings, making Talumudic Amulets and much, much more.
Back to work, I gotta fulfill another 85 orders tonight; jewelry kits and handmade earrings are flowing like water, exactly as intended … (IN A TIGHT, THROATY HISSING VOICE) it is exactly as I have foreseen.
Rather than turn Luke to the Dark Side, I have another, much better, mission for you. How about getting out there with these earrings and building kits and get yourself in motion???
This is not about money. I have much easier ways to earn a livelihood, and in fact every penny goes back into development of new ideas and new Reincarnation Awareness Kits such as the Stone Age Series, the Ancient Empires Kits and the Medieval & Pioneer Kits.
Messing about with ancient beads and placing beads into ancient and off-world designs will definitely trigger you into visions, but they won’t all crowd in at once, or overwhelm you with memories of thousands of lives all at once.
Memories flow through a Memory-Trap, which looks at them one at a time. Notice the memory flow you have every single day, all day long. Memories tend to be fugitive and flowing, and it’s going to be a tough job to try to actually SEE what’s passing through your memory bank and in some cases, disarming the effect of a past life on the present lifetime. Continue reading →
Ken Paulson built our West Hollywood copper shop in 1974 where we sold jewelry.
Selling jewelry is easy. All you have to do is find a heavily trafficked location at which to conduct your business, and engage everyone in the creative process; get them involved. Continue reading →
Pinky & Lucky Duck are avid collectors of Modernist jewelry, and make their own.
Here is a simple design for TWO Modernist Copper Pendants. Modernism began back in the early 1930s, springing from the avant-garde schools that followed the post-impressionists and the postwar schools of art both in American and Europe in the 1940s and into the 1950s. Continue reading →
Your Ur-Style Pearl & Copper Earrings could easily have been worn by a woman of the early Bronze Age, when metallurgical embellishments included granulation, as do the ones you’ll be making. Granulation is a hand-craft. The beautiful but slightly irregularly shaped off-round pearls are similar to the Mediterranean pearl, the last of which were fished out of the sea many centuries ago.
Your Borgia Green Onyx Copper Earrings could easily have been worn by a Renaissance woman during the reign of the Borgia family. Goldsmithing had developed into a fine and exacting science, and metallurgy was now shared amongst scholars and tradesmen. Alloying metals was no longer a guarded secret handed down through the generations — it had become a textbook science.
