New! Silk and Stone Wrap Bracelets

What's new in the shop these days? 

Well, after a busy holiday season and getting through some January colds and viruses, I had a bit of a drought when it came to new items for the shop. Feeling better this month, I was anxious to get back to my jewelry table! I have some wonderful supplies and was looking for new ways to combine them.

I dug out these beautiful, hand dyed, 100% silk ribbons that I ordered a few months ago. Silk wrap bracelets in various forms are popular right now, and I wanted to see what I could create that was just a little different than the many offerings currently out there.

I came up with what I call a 'Tribal Twist' Silk and Stone Wrap Bracelets. With a little bit of s-lon beading thread and some Czech seed beads, I strung stone rounds and nuggets in 6mm-8mm sizes, knotting the ribbon in between, to create comfortable, light and colorful wrap bracelets.

The beauty of these is the variety of stones and sizes I can create. I can add more beads for a shorter wrap, or a few less to fit larger wrists. All of the ones I have created so far will fit anywhere from a petite to large wrist size, wrapping three times around for most, twice for a larger wrist.

I am having a great time choosing stones and silks to pair up, so look for more of these in the coming weeks!

Crazy Lace Agate Pink Silk and Stone Wrap

 

Packaged on a bracelet card shows how it can look on the wrist. 

 

Fossil Coral Jasper Brown Silk and Stone Wrap

 

Labradorite Navy Silk and Stone Wrap.

Website Redesign!

One of the many things on my to-do list has been to update my main website. 

I use FolioLink, an artist and photographer website provider, and have for several years now. They provide great service and offer a good selection of templates. I have used the Berlin template for a number of years. It is clean and straightforward, but I was getting tired of it and looking for an update. I also have added the jewelry and craft side of my business, so the number of info pages and portfolios I wanted to include were crowding my navigation a bit in the old template (see the portfolio links at the top and the info pages at the bottom?):

 
I periodically looked for a new template, but never quite found what I wanted until they released Auckland (HTML) last year.

It actually took much less time than I thought to adjust my content to the new template and I basically worked on it over the last couple of weeks. It offers a slightly bigger image size for my portfolios (always a good thing when viewing artwork), and I really like the sliding menu on the left. It keeps the main content pane cleaner for viewing and then the user can always go to the left (or use the arrow navigation at the bottom) to move to another section. I an also add more info pages or portfolios without crowding out the navigation scheme.

 Main page

Sliding Menu

I think what I like most about this is that I could do it myself. A few emails to FolioLink and their prompt replies allowed me to tweak the template to match my color scheme and really capture the look I wanted for my site.

So, have a look at the new site here and feel free to sign the guestbook!

http://www.ccreechstudio.com

Have you redesigned your website recently? Or are you still waiting to get to that? :) What did you find easiest or most difficult about the process?