New Argentium Sterling Silver Pieces Available

Violet Pink Czech Glass on Argentium Sterling Silver

We are so excited to share with you some of our newest pieces created with the finest Argentium sterling silver. A little while ago we decided to invest in some of the highest quality sterling that we could find and we could never look back now. These pieces are so beautiful and Argentium sterling silver has non-tarnish properties that will keep it looking beautiful. Please check out the new pieces and let us know what you think. We hope you'll love them as much as we do!

A hit at the Met!

For the past week and a half Canada Post has been on strike putting a big damper on shipping our products through Etsy. Luckily, Ashley and I had a great opportunity to sell our jewelry downtown London at a local artisan show.

Our jewelry was well received, most people enjoyed the variety through our creations: While some people favor a more classic vintage feel, others would be excited to see brighter colours with a fun romantic twist. That's the beauty of our shop, we've got something for everyone and even though there were a few other jewelry vendors at the show, Yaylove was able to hold it's own uniqueness.

Yaylove Will Be At The Metropolitan Market This Weekend!

Yaylove will be a vendor at The Metropolitan Market this weekend during the car free festival! The Met is a weekend market for local artisans in downtown London. If you're free please come down and check out our booth :D

Stay tuned for more pictures of our booth and the crowd at The Met.

For more information check out:
http://www.metropolitanmarket.ca/

Metal Stamping --Yaylove style

Hello everyone,

The day has finally come! What day is that? You might ask... the day our custom metal stamp came in the mail! Today's blog is focused on metal stamping; an art that was a bit of a mystery to me until I did a little (and I mean a little) research. Of course Ashley and I haven't thrown ourselves into metal stamping full-tilt, we were looking for some kind of branding piece for our jewelry. This was exactly what we were looking for. A very big thanks goes out to Donald at Tinkertools (http://www.etsy.com/people/TINKERTOOLS). He was able to custom craft a metal stamp with the yaylove flower on it.

Our adventure begins with a bit of online research and tutorials. We then pulled out a heavy hammer, our jewelry anvil, a cutting matt and the beautiful little custom stamp.

The process:
1. Place cutting matt on a counter or a solid surface (not your glass coffee table).
2. Place anvil on cutting matt with metal tag on anvil.
3. Hold the metal stamp close to the base and place it on top of the metal tag.
4. Position the metal stamp on metal tag and hold.
5. While somehow plugging your ears, hit the top of the metal stamp as hard as you can with the hammer and hope that you still have all your fingers.
6. Repeat step 5 twice more.
7. Remove the metal stamp from metal tag et voilà! An awesome yaylove tag ready to brand our jewelry with.
8. Optional: rub metal tag with ink or acrylic paint, then wipe off (we wanted to keep the impression clean, so we avoided doing this, but may explore in the future).

It took exactly 3 tags until we finally got the hitting process down, and then we were on a metal-tag-making role! KABAM! More lovely little tags!

Hope you enjoyed the post, until next time, my friends!

Kristy

Yaylove is Now Worldwide

Click to view larger.

We are so excited to share a map of our trending visitor locations with you from our Google Analytics. One of the things that makes Etsy so great is how international it is and we are so happy to be able to share our creations with people all over the world. Thank you for visiting us!

New Rings Now Available

Freshwater Pearl and Glass Cluster Ring

We are excited to announce that some beautiful new ring designs have been released to our etsy shop and we wanted to share them with you. The new rings feature freshwater pearls, czech glass, faceted glass beads and faux pearls as well as interesting metal work designs. Please let us know what you think!

Yaylove Giveaway!

Have you gotten in on the Yaylove giveaway yet? Our friend Kim of the blog Playing Grown Up has arranged a wonderful giveaway with us. Simply comment on her post with what you hate most about being a grown up and be entered to win! Check it out here.

Spring Wedding Show at the Drake Hotel in Toronto

Beautiful hand felted woodland creatures and natural elements by Toronto artisan, Little M Inventions

 This past weekend we traveled the relatively short distance to the Spring Wedding Show at the Drake Hotel in Toronto. It was a fantastic event. The show was spread out over two floors of the hotel, with a wide variety of handmade goods including letterpress invitations, handmade fascinators and boutineers, and of course, jewelry. There were even handmade clay flowers that looked amazingly real as well as caterers with delicious samples and very talented photographers. Inspiration abound!

Our First Etsy Packaging

A cute, handwritten note on the back of our mini business cards gets added inside each bag.

Kristy and I both spent a few long nights experimenting and researching packaging ideas. One our challenges here as a Canadian Etsy seller is that our packages (including the bubble mailer) must fit through the 2cm high "slot of doom" at Canada Post or face significantly high postage fees. Right off the bat we knew that we couldn't do a jewelry box.

So we began looking at alternative ideas. We knew that we really wanted to create the packaging by hand as we are big supporters of the handmade culture and we felt that it would really be a nice touch to add to our handmade jewelry.

After a bit of experimentation Kristy created these gorgeous little canvas bags that she sew up with bright red thread. Tied up with a gorgeous little bit of red ribbon, we think they really came together beautifully! (And nice and flat, too.) See the pics below. What do you think?

How To Improve Your Etsy Photography

As a newbie to the Etsy community, I've spent some time trying to get to know it better lately. One thing that I've noticed a lot of people are struggling with is product photography, especially photo editing. There are a lot of photos on Etsy that with just a few tweaks here and there could be dramatically improved, and I wanted to share a few helpful hints on how to do it. I've put together a brief tutorial here using a free photo editing service Picnik with some simple tips that I hope will help out beginners.

Before and After Examples