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~!

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~!

Here is another treasury of really cool photos/items that I have “curated” on etsy (link below), the online craft show. This treasury did rather well statistically. It went to page 2 of etsy treasuries. (That is very good~!) And as of today, it has over 400 views. It is fun to make a treasury…. but the competitive goal is to get a treasury onto the 1st page, or better yet the main page of etsy.com (click here to see what i mean… etsy.com).  Then where it says: Handpicked Items See more… click on the “See More“… and that takes you to the list of the top treasuries, page 1. My college friend Kelly has been getting treasuries onto page one on a regular basis these days. That takes strategy, and time~! (To see Kelly’s Page, stained glass items, and access her treasuries, “Click here for Kelly”.) She said, it is fun to see the treasury climb the pages~! Now I know what she means. It was fun when my “Glass House” Treasury (see my last blog entry) went to the top of page 3…. and this one went to the middle of page 2.

But you may wonder why we make these treasuries. Well, mostly it is fun. But, it is also reciprocal. We make connections with other people who make treasuries… and we all promote each others’ work… we all get more exposure, presence, visibility.

AND… I love the Mad Hatter chair… too bad it is in New Zealand~! Go check out this Kaleidoscope of colors treasury~!

Click Here to visit the page: Kaleidoscope of Rainbow Color to Celebrate Spring

I curated a “Treasury” on etsy. I chose a theme and found interesting photos and items to go with that theme. These are fun to create. But, there is an added art… We try to get our collection onto the front page of the “etsy” website. One of the rules to making a treasury is that we’re not allowed to promote our own work… only that of other exhibitors of this online craft show. I am having fun. But, I am also meeting other people who like to make treasuries. So, maybe you’ll see the work of Hayden Brook Studios in someone else’s collection.

Link to Event: If You Live in a Glass House, Don’t Throw Stones

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~!

Our buddy, Michael Mullaney (Publisher, Editor, Sales & Webmaster of The Cape Cod Maritime Guide) just contacted us this week. He is trying to attract a more diverse group of tourists/ fishermen/ and lovers of Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod to his website and publication. He offered us a space. Here is a Cape Cod Specific Ad we came up with… just for Mike! Now go check out what he is into… pretty cool stuff going on ~! Oh man~! Who wouldn’t want to go to Cape Cod~! I sure do. Well, look up the Cape Cod Maritime Guide when you are planning your trip! Maybe you’ll even run into Michael Mullaney himself! Tell him Brook and Laurie said “HI”.

This image is a link to see it larger… On the Cape Cod Maritime Guide…

Meet Lilly. This is our new kiln. She just came this week. Brook and I are learning to work with precious metal clay (PMC). We are trained in traditional silversmithing techniques. But, we love to keep learning new things. This was an obvious choice of what to learn next. PMC is fine silver particles in a clay form. When the clay is fired, the binder burns away leaving only fine silver, 99.9% pure fine silver. It is not so easy to work glass into the metal clay. There are some finicky rules, like melting points! Not every experiment is yielding perfect results. But, overall we are pleased. We are going to be introducing several lines of PMC jewelry at the Rosen Show this February… we’re developing them now as we experiment. Brook was more ambitious than me… He took some photos of his exciting new experiments. Wanna see?