Hayden Brook Studios – Hayden Blog

Hi Everyone,

I am now blogging at a different blog address. Feel free to explore this older blog, which has some fine content. But, make sure to pop over to the new blog. Life is so very precious, and I like to inspire faith and happiness. When you go to the new blog, make sure to click the “Follow This Blog” button in the top right corner.

Click here to visit my new blog~!

“The true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.” 

~ William Morris

We’ve been up to some fun at Hayden Brook Studios. The online business has been booming, and we are doing fewer shows. What on earth do we do with the extra time? Well, we keep developing the online business, for one thing. We make new “stuff”, too. It is all very cool. We are having a great time. One thing I’ve been enjoying about the online business is meeting people from many different places in the world. We have had about 1300 sales in our first year online. You’ve got to figure, that’s without having built a following, and not knowing what we are doing. I think it is only going to keep getting better. I am learning to use the camera. That is a very important part of doing business online. There are still a few bugs to work out. But, it seems to keep getting better. I am very excited about some of the new directions we are taking. I love the new clocks~! They will all be one of a kind. There are some pretty ones we’ll be listing next week. I hope they find homes for Christmas. The jewelry racks were made years ago. We took them to a few shows, only to find that we weren’t allowed to show them at those shows. There are enforced rules at the good shows~!  The racks were out of our “category”. So, they went into a box, and stayed there for years. At this point we have reduced their price, and we are hoping they get wonderful places to live rich lives displaying beautiful jewelry.

This link will take you to the wackiest section of our shop… the NON-Jewelry section~!

This link will take you to our BOOKMARKS shop….. ALL of the items are bookmarks…. very cool bookmarks~!

This link will take you to our wonderful glass jewelry shop… YAY~!

At Hayden Brook Studios we have 3 sets of hands making jewelry. There is Hayden (me), Brook (my husband), and Terry (our great buddy).  Terry and her husband Dan have an amazing garden, full of flowers, herbs, and veggies. They are so serious about their garden that they start a bunch of stuff indoors to get a jump on the season. They compost intelligently. And, when they have extra money, they’ll most likely invest it in garden related products. Brook and I get a few of the perks of having friends with an enchanted garden…. SUPER-SIZED zucchini’s to make carb free pizza…. cilantro…. fresh tomatoes… ya know…

BUT, this was an unexpected perk…. the birth announcement in triplicate of the Praying Mantis Hatches.  How amazing~!  You can blow these photos up by clicking on them…. You should really do that. They are awesome photos~!  (Dan is a photographer…. as you can surely tell.) And below these photos, there is the note that Terry sent to describe what is going on… their National Geographic Moment.

You can read about the benefits of having these little guys all over your garden:  NATURAL PEST CONTROL WITH PRAYING MANTIS

We have just opened a brand new on-line store yesterday. We have been making Dichroic Fused Glass Jewelry since 1994. So this NEW store is fresh and fun. It will allow us freedom from having to be stuck making the same thing over and over for our wholesale accounts…. and since we won’t be wholesaling from the new store, we’ll be able to price things however we want… not stuck having to “keystone” (double) our set wholesale prices.

SO? What will we be doing in this new online shop? Book Marks – yes… bookmarks in a huge range of media. I am thinking leather, metal, glass, polymer clay, collage, ribbon, yarn,  fiber… I have a list a mile long. I wish my days were as long as my list of ideas. As of right now, we might have 10 book marks listed… but we have  a lot of adventure ahead of us… and I am thrilled for this adventure.

Here is a link to the new store. Click on our store banner:

I know, I know…. you are excited for us… Of Course!~! But don’t forget to keep watching, and shopping at Hayden Brook Studios for that awesome bright dichroic fused glass jewelry you have been loving all these years~! And always… thanks for spending your precious time visiting us. We really appreciate you~! Click either image to go visit our etsy shop~!

I made a “treasury” of items on “etsy”. Some may ask, “What the heck does THAT mean?” Well, it is a collection of items I like that follow a common theme. There are links to read more about each of these items. In this case, I have written about hand crafted body care products. I have been amazed and impressed with the all natural bath and body products on this online craft show, called “ETSY”. I have a new outlook on the type of products I will allow to come in contact with MY body. I guess it makes sense that most of the lotion you put on your skin sinks into your body. Skin is an organ. How about dental care? People take medicine sub-lingually (under the tongue). That means the toothpaste has 2+ minutes to enter my bloodstream. When I look at lists of ingredients 2 miles long, and wonder what I am putting into my body, it is scary. No wonder there are so many bizarre illnesses, like cancer and chronic fatigue. We are poisoning ourselves incrementally every day if we aren’t paying attention to what we are putting into our systems. Anyway, I put together a collection of LOVELY bath and body care products, even for DOGS~! Come visit my treasury and investigate these really cool stores.

PURE Natural Clean FUN Treasury

I am so excited. We just ordered these cute little business cards. They are 1/2 the size of a normal business card… very cute.  They give you the option of putting a ton of unique images on 1 side of the card. So… look what I did. I went into our Hayden Brook jewelry photo archives and took details of our jewelry and cropped them into the shape of the cards. I chose to use these 18 images on the one side. The other side says our name, our medium, and our web address. We ordered these because we got The Philadelphia Museum of Art as a wholesale account, and they wanted our work on small cards. I almost ordered something completely blank… but then I pulled my friend Lynn’s business card out of my purse. It was a tiny Moo Card. It hit me that this would be a good answer. So LOOK~!~! I am so pleased. They arrived last night. We had so much fun putting that order together for the museum gift shop.

Thanks Lynn~!  Here is a link to Lynn’s Online Store: UnaOdd

Link to Moo Cards: Moo Cards

We have been working on our design lines for 2011. That involves coming up with a basic concept, and then working it into many forms. For example, I thought it would be fun to have a lolly pop flower type of line this year. Simple and cute. So, the first thing I did was to make a few sample nuggets. I played around with the bracelet nuggets first. Once I had the basic look I wanted, I started to figure out how I would like the dangle earrings, varied pins and pendants, bracelets, and tiny studs to look. Brook wanted to work with the new technology of crinkled dichroic glass in a line this year. So, I had him sketch some idea of what he would like it to look like. We are introducing these new lines at the Philadelphia Buyers Market this week. In addition to the 2 new lines, we have taken advantage of advancing glass technology to update 4 of our older lines, too.  It has been a very complex season preparing for this year’s new lines and updates~! Then, we wanted to show our wholesale buyers photos of these lines to take away from the wholesale show… but we wanted to keep our prices low. So, for the first time, I designed the color catalog supplement, and we went to Staples for a reduced cost printing. Not quite as flashy as our past color supplements, but we are quite pleased with what we’ve come up with. It is a new look… like a sunny day at the beach. It does show some of our glass colors rather well, too. Here are our 2011 line sheet supplements to go with our color catalog (the one’s shop owners buy from… sorry, these are NOT retail prices). But, we figured you would enjoy seeing what we’ve been up to for the last month~!

I gotta tell ya, I am having so much fun creating the Hayden Brook Online Shopping Cart`! Brook and I have been loading items onto the website for several weeks now, with the goal of having 1000 items on line at all times. It is a pretty big goal, and more time consuming than I had originally thought. To photograph and list items does take a bit of time. But, people are looking at our work, and buying it too~! One of the things I am particularly enjoying is that I don’t have to work within a restricted medium category. At craft shows, we are pretty much limited to selling glass jewelry. But, in our real lives, we like to create other items as well. I am also a fiber artist. Most of the time I am the sole recipient of that passion. But now I have about 20 Hayden Brook Handbags on the site… well… most of them are listed…  few more are waiting to be listed. We have experimented with other functional items. You can see them in our store~! We sold a purse today. What a mixed emotion… so happy, yet sad, to see it find a good home. Come visit the HaydenBrook store: Click here for our Online Store~!

Brook and I have had the immense pleasure of being best friends with this perfect animal. He was very loyal, very sweet. He made a great buddy for 10 years. We just lost him last night. I am grieving today. I will miss him terribly.

Samson was a chocolate chihuahua, 6 pounds. He had the demeanor of a teddy bear crossed with a rag doll, come to life. He liked to stay close to us wherever we went. He was Brook’s little shadow. Most of the time we would take him with us when we would travel. He would see his carrier come out, and he would beam with joy… marvelous tail wagging wonderfully. The tail was great… very expressive.  When we would say his name he would wag it slowly. If we would say his name over and over fast (SampSampSampySamp), he would wag it real fast. So cute!

Last April I felt a lump on his side. We took him to the vet immediately. We weighed his options and decided to keep him on 2 medications. Operating would be too complex as he wasn’t aging as well as we’d hoped. He did quite well for 7 months. Then the tumor started to grow really aggressively. Arthritic bones were having trouble supporting the extra weight. Samp slowed down a lot in the last week. He didn’t seem to be in a lot of pain, but breathing got more difficult, and walking, too.

We kept praying that he would fall asleep and not wake up. We would bring him to bed with us over the last 4 days, because we didn’t want him to die alone. We knew he was getting closer… though still not “suffering” enough to have him put down. Yesterday he decided he was done eating, even his special favorites. We took him out for a nice walk, carrying him. He liked it. It was a good last day. We thought we’d have to take him to the vet today. But around 1AM last night, he woke us up to say goodbye. He was snuggled up to Brook, and we were with him for his last breath. It is a sad kind of relief that he then died. We didn’t want him to suffer. He lived well, and died well. Strong and brave. He was a great gift to us from God. A great delight. I will love him for the rest of my life.

We see a lot of the same customers come back again and again for more HBS jewelry. They will have gotten compliments, or will have gotten personally attached to what they had already bought, and find they “need” more… maybe in a different color… blue, pink, green, rusty oranges…. or hot mixes of all the colors~!

Meet Jillian. Age 7. Jillian is one of our returning customers. She looks for us specifically when she comes to a PA Guild craft show. We see a lot of these precious youngsters returning to Hayden Brook, year after year. We have tiny button earrings, adjustable rings, bobby pins, 1″ barrettes, pins, and even pendants sized for this younger generation. I love when parents have the discipline to make their children look at every booth in the craft show, and then decide what they want, after they have seen everything. Very, very often, I see cuties like Jillian come back and get their special something from us. And look at this girl! She is so cute! She makes me smile even without buying jewelry! Jillian chose a pink and gold rainbow colored 1″ barrette. I have to admit she has fine taste in jewelry. It was the best tiny barrette we had on display that day.

We have seen other “Jillian’s” over the last 17 years. Some of them are now in college, studying art, or jewelry. Some are working as artisans, selling on etsy, or displaying down the aisle from us at wholesale shows. Others are craft collectors.  Of course, to perpetuate the craft industry we need to raise up future buyers! They start out as young girls, hoping to find a rainbow that they can hold in their hand, or wear in their hair.

Brook delights in “custom fitting” an adjustable ring on a tiny little finger, and seeing these youthful faces burst into big smiles. And then, we get to see them grow up into lovers of fine art and craft. Still glowing with satisfaction when we outfit them with a set of earrings and a pendant, to match the scarf they just bought down the aisle. One more reason to love my amazing job~! (Thank YOU God~!)