jewelry not yet on etsy

love this one- the asher. champagne citrine (notice the new shape?!), london blue topaz (also new shape!), sky blue topaz, and smoky quartz, 18"- $78.



this is like a retired beanie baby. i'm not sure how, i just think it's funny when people compare things to beanie babies. actually, i'll tell you how. the smoky quartz stone above is really pretty, but the angle of the top of it is not something i was prepared for, and most were too wide to wrap. on the rest the wire just bunched and said, "no way, jose." i think the ones that worked went to the stores, and maybe i kept one. a new version of this necklace is available without so much wire wrapping at the top. 36"- $68.

this was made with valentine's day in mind, and although it's not in my etsy shop, it is available at jenni b. in monrovia and dreamy in encinitas. or just email me and i'll make you one. rose quartz and rhodolite garnet, 18"- $48.
these i only have one picture of, which is why they're not on etsy. i kind of like them, though, so maybe i'll have to make another pair and stage a photo shoot. black tourmaline and sapphires, $98.
the above bracelet and earrings are london blue, white, and sky blue topaz, champagne citrine, and smoky quartz. the whole blue and brown thing. i tried taking some artsy shots of the earrings in our christmas tree, but that was a disaster. looks like the lighting still wasn't great for the above pictures...earrings- $98, bracelet- $198.

this necklace is a version of a necklace i made and sold at the la county fair years ago, before i started photographing my jewelry. now it's called the mabel, and it's $298 if anybody's interested. adjustable from 16"-18".

that is a custom pendant i made for someone- a gift for her from her. it's similar to the avery necklace, with mint quartz, green sapphires, and headpins i made myself! the heart clasp isn't actually part of it, just holding it for the shot.

i made the above earrings for a bride last fall. keishi pearls, white topaz, and rhodolite garnet. I think they ended up being about 2.5 inches, and went nicely with her very drapey orchid bouquet.

for my next trick

i'm going to try to make these bracelets...

new jewelry in the shop!

i finally listed a few new things in my etsy shop. more to come soon!

mary vii: fluorite on gold-filled (or sterling silver) chain $68

mary x: lemon quartz on gold-filled chain $68

mary xii: london blue topaz on gold-filled (or sterling silver) chain $68

mary xiii: smooth citrine on gold-filled chain $58

rachelle necklace: tourmaline on gold-filled chain $298

unique la

this saturday, my mom and i went to unique la, a neat show at the california mart downtown with a bunch of crafty local designers. we saw stacey winters, who makes (and photographs, cause she's a photographer!) the following stuff:

and her bluebird print is the cover art for a new book!

and kelly robinson, who is a friend of a friend, and had this neat booth setup:

she also has a cupcake and event planning business, where she does amazing stuff like this:

so much talent! we bought a few things for each other's stockings, and i could have spent thousands pretty easily. we had a lot of fun, and maybe next year i'll have a booth of my own!

marlo noël in a new shop!

marlo noël jewelry has landed here right down the street in encinitas, just in time for the holidays. it's a fabulous little shop called dreamy run by the nicest networker ever, heather o'quinn. if you're local, go over and check it out! or go to their website, cause it's so lovely.

ps: clearly not my jewelry above, but isn't that picture beautiful? it's actually jewelry from chris bolton, a customer of mine at paper source who sells to celebrities like gwyneth paltrow. how neat!


and look at that little bubble- dreamy was just featured in in style magazine- what timing!

they also sell wonderful gift items. you should do all your shopping there. or here.

another treasury!

how nice to be included in someone's beautiful treasury. Thanks, Holly!

on textbooks

I've been reading this really great blog, and wanting to post something from it for you all to read. seth godin is a marketer who writes books (and a daily blog), and is really insightful about the new ways of marketing, and life. here's something i think anyone who ever had to buy a college textbook can relate to:

textbook rant:

I've spent the last few months looking at marketing textbooks. I'm assuming that they are fairly representative of textbooks in general, and since this is a topic I'm interested in, it seemed like a good area to focus on.

As far as I can tell, assigning a textbook to your college class is academic malpractice.

They are expensive. $50 is the low end, $200 is more typical. A textbook author in Toronto made enough money from his calculus textbook to afford a $20 million house. This is absurd on its face. There's no serious insight or leap in pedagogy involved in writing a standard textbook. That's what makes it standard. It's hard, but it shouldn't make you a millionaire.

They don't make change. Textbooks have very little narrative. They don't take you from a place of ignorance to a place of insight. Instead, even the best marketing textbooks surround you with a fairly non-connected series of vocabulary words, oversimplified problems and random examples.

They're out of date and don't match the course. The 2009-2010 edition of the MKTG textbook, which is the hippest I could find, has no entries in the index for Google, Twitter, or even Permission Marketing.

They don't sell the topic. Textbooks today are a lot more colorful and breezy than they used to be, but they are far from engaging or inspirational. No one puts down a textbook and says, "yes, this is what I want to do!"

They are incredibly impractical. Not just in terms of the lessons taught, but in terms of being a reference book for years down the road.

In a world of wikipedia, where every definition is a click away, it's foolish to give me definitions to memorize. Where is the context? When I want to teach someone marketing (and I do, all the time) I never present the information in the way a textbook does. I've never seen a single blog post that says, "wait until I explain what I learned from a textbook!"

The solution seems simple to me. Professors should be spending their time devising pages or chapterettes or even entire chapters on topics that matter to them, then publishing them for free online. (it's part of their job, remember?) When you have a class to teach, assemble 100 of the best pieces, put them in a pdf or on a kindle or a website (or even in a looseleaf notebook) and there, you're done. You just saved your intro marketing class about $15,000. Every semester. Any professor of intro marketing who is assigning a basic old-school textbook is guilty of theft or laziness.

This industry deserves to die. It has extracted too much time and too much money and wasted too much potential. We can do better. A lot better.

[Update: got more mail about this post than any other post ever. People pointed to Flatworld and to Quirk, and so far, more than 94% of the letters aggressively agree with me. Most of the people are either students, parents of students, former students or other disgruntled customers that are tired of being ripped off by a senseless, broken system. I also heard from a handful of people who said that I was jealous, that the union won't permit the system to change, that textbooks are really good, that professors are underpaid, that professors are too busy or (possibly and) that I'm delusional. I'll note that not one of these letters came from a textbook user.]