All Things Metal Clay
An Expert Guide

Check out the pilot episodes at Bench Jewelers Television Network, Season One begins January 2008. Bench Media publishes Bench Magazine and holds conferences around the country specifically for bench jewelers.

The channels will include:

Shop Management
Stone Setting
Jewelry Repair
Custom Manufacturing
Laser Welding
Bench Techniques
New Products

New episodes will be aired online very month.

Even if you’re not a bench jeweler, you’re sure to learn from this terrific resource. The information in the magazine is always clearly presented and relevent.

Pledge to Buy Handmade this holiday season at BuyHandmade.org.

Here’s what it says:

“I have taken a pledge to BUY HANDMADE this holiday season. I do this
to support independent creators, and to be an educated consumer who
knows how and where the products I purchase are produced.

I also want to give some truly unique and special gifts this season.”

You can take the pledge yourself at http://buyhandmade.org.

Con’d

Lots of stuff to do in Paris! While you’re there, hop over to the ">Pablo Picasso Museum, not far away either.

Also walking distance is the relatively new Ateliers d’Art de France Art Gallery for one of a kind pieces and regular exhibits, called “Collection”
“Collection” - 4 rue de Thorigny, 75003 Paris.

The Ateliers d’Art also have 3 shops with beautiful artisan work in the 17th, but you’ll need to take the metro, and actually not far from the Arc de Triomphe : Ateliers d’Art de France Boutiques - 22 and 26, avenue Niel, 75017 Paris, France.

All the info is on their website, and you can also see some of the artists’ work up under the “Directory of Workshops” link. I’m in there too. You can find me under “corporate name search = L’Ange Est La.”

A must is a visit to the Museum of Decorative Arts, which has a whole jewelry gallery going from antiquity to contemporary jewelry. Each piece is beautifully hung in an elegant setting and perfect lighting. It’s on 107-111, rue de Rivoli, 75001 Paris.

Cross the street and go for one of the best hot chocolate in town at Angelina’s Salon de Thé (Tea Room) on 226 rue de Rivoli, same street as the museum.

All this is walking distance from the Louvre, and just next to the Carrousel du Louvre underground shopping center, as a matter of fact, if you want to avoid the long waiting lines to enter the Louvre from the outside Pyramid, then enter the underground « Carrousel du Louvre », pass all the shops, all the way to where the upside down part of the pyramid is, and get in from there directly into the Egyptian wing.

By now you’ll probably want to sleep! After a good bath to soak your feet and body in, and another good night’s rest get ready for more!

Wake up and go for a walk down Saint Germain des Près Boulevard, visit Saint Germain church and stop for coffee, tea or chocolate and a croissant at the Deux Magots, on the same side of the street as the church.

Coffee here is more expensive, but you can rest your feet as long as you like over one single expresso while people watching, a national sport practiced in most side-walk cafés.

You’ll also enjoy going back in time when you realize some seats have names of a number of famous philosophers and artists of the past such as Verlain or Rimbault, and later Satre, Hemingway, Picasso, Fernand Léger, Simone de Beauvoir, who would meet here and “talk story” while re-creating the world.

Now that you’ve got that extra caffeine, and that your feet are set, you’ll have more energy to cross the street and go towards the Galerie Hélène Porée on 1 rue de L’Odéon, Paris 6e arr. for more eye candy from its highly selected art jewelry and ceramics. See for yourself here.

Next visit the Théatre de L’Odéon, the Luxembourg park and the Senate while you’re there, all just a skip hop and a jump. Now start heading for the 7th arrondissement. for a visit to the Galerie Elsa Vanier - 7 rue du Près aux Clercs. You can get a glimpse of the jewelry artists the gallery represents here.

It’s a pleasant walk with tons of window-shopping on the way.

And last of all, if you like to add fabric, ribbons and buttons to your work then you’ll want to go the Marché St. Pierre in the 18th arrondissement, not far from Montmartre.

Big choice in this one store, but there are many other smaller shops in the nearby streets in the same area. While you’re there go and take a detour to visit the Basilique du Sacre-Cœur in Montmartre, historical, full of street artists and cafés. Take a break and enjoy the beautiful view of Paris by night-fall when the city lights begin to turn on and the sky is pink-purple with streaks of gold.

Have a safe and pleasant trip and get ready for some major inspiration !

Other related museums to visit :

le Musée de la Monaie (coins and medals), Odéon;
Musée de la Minérologie (minerals) near the Luxembourg gardens, both of the above in the 6th arrond.
Also: Fondation Cartier, private museum for contemporary art.

For an online list of museums of the city of Paris, click ">here.

Or other museums by neighborhood (arrondissement), click ">here.

(c) 2007 Angela Baduel-Crispin All Rights Reserved

Visit Angela’s site here.

Technorati Tags:
travel, Paris, jewelry
Add to: | Technorati |  

Please welcome guest blogger Angela Baduel-Crispin, who has generously written Jewelry Tourism: Paris for us. She has so many wonderful places for us to visit, her article will be published over a couple of days.

Visit Angela’s site here.

Olà là … Paris! Jewelry tourism in Paris… worth a whole visit in itself!

Planning your first trip to Paris and would like to discover everything there is to see plus a bit more, beyond the usual guided tours?

Or, maybe, you’ve already been to Paris and visited the Eiffel Tower, the Arc du Triomphe, gone for a boat ride (or better yet, a romantic dinner on the Seine!) visited the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, The Rodin Museum, The Musée d’Art Moderne, the new Musée des Arts Premiers, and the Centre Georges Pompidou, just to name a few.

You might already have visited the beautiful spots the city has to offer, and walked down all the endless quaint little side-streets in the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th and even in the 7th arrondissement, and you still have energy left! You love and design jewelry yourself and want to discover neat addresses, find inspiration and see even more this time around. Good for you!

All I can say is - you’re in for a journey so wear good walking shoes, take a good night’s sleep and get ready to discover the other sparkles of Paris.

You can begin your trip by visiting the Place Vendôme with all its famous jewelry stores. Once you’ve finished drooling on the windows, the glitter of all the gold and diamonds has finally died out and you’ve finally recovered your vision, then get out of there and go buy things to make your own unique, authentic signature jewelry to drool for!

If you want to buy beads, tools and things wholesale go to Rue du Temple in the 3e arrondissement.

There’s one shop after another for supplies, strands of stones, beads. This is the jewelry-making supply (and ready-made) neighborhood for wholesalers. You’ll find well-known suppliers like “Venot et fils” on rue du Temple, with their 2 stores one across the street from the other.

In the same area, on a perpendicular street is Selfor, a sort of jewelry-making supermarket open to the public, with 3 stores, tools, findings, showcase material, gift boxes and wrapping.

Selfor - 11 rue Réaumur, Paris 3e arrondissement. Also Not far is Cookson gold-CLAL strictly for professionals, which sells tools, findings, finished jewelry, does reclaiming, etc.

Also a little bit further is “Fried Freres“, 13 rue du Caire, Paris 2e Arr.

They also own “La boïte à Perles.”

There are a number of retailers as well. One of these is La Droguerie, with tons of neat thingies, buttons, ideas, etc. for DIY costume jewelry and customizing.

Tout à Loisirs is another neat store as well, which deserves a visit in person although they have a website as well. 50 rue des Archives, Paris 3e arrondissement.

Their retail shop selection is a bit expensive but really nice, with a variety of stones, beads of all sorts in glass, natural materials and some vintage beads too.

This store is on a neat little street, and walking distance from Le Bazar de L’Hotel de Ville Department Store. Across the street from Tout à Loisirs on rue des archives, there’s a wonderful jewelry gallery too, if that hasn’t changed in the last couple of months.

Their wholesale store is at another address : 77 rue du Temple, 75003 Paris, not far away, and on the same street I mentioned earlier where all the other wholesale jewelry shops are.

Actually, the whole Marais neighborhood (4th arrondissement) is worth walking through and visiting with its neat little shops. It’s one of the rare districts in Paris where shops are open on Sundays. And you can walk just a little bit further to the Place des Vosges, with it’s art galleries under the arches and also visit the home of page_id=5852">Victor Hugo.

More tomorrow!

(c) 2007 Angela Baduel-Crispin All Rights Reserved

Technorati Tags:
Paris, jewelry, tourism, shop
Add to: | Technorati |  

Below is my advice to a specific jeweler on how to position and sell her work. I think it will be helpful to others who are trying to sell their work, as they might be having similar challenges.

The CRAFT Magazine blog is one of my favorites, and recently they had a post about a jeweler who wrote on her blog about a terrible show experience. Another blogger posted a response to her post on her own blog!

And CRAFT reported on them both, you can read that here.

The author of the original post, and the one who had the awful show, is jeweler Margaux Lange, who makes these really cool pieces framing Barbie (R) body parts in silver and resin.

I rarely write a post in response to someone else’s blog, but I have something original to say that hasn’t been said (that I’ve noticed) in any of the many, many comments on the other two blogs.

Here’s Margaux’s original post.

So she had the kind of show where you feel like you’re in the zoo, people just walk by and look at you, or worse, they come in to your booth and make offensive comments. I’ve been there. My worst show ever I sold one polishing cloth.

She says maybe this wasn’t the right show for her, and while I don’t know the show, it certainly seems like that’s true.

One of my suggestions to her is to upgrade her booth just a bit. A back wall to her tent would help reduce distraction. The quality of her work and the quality of her booth do not match at the moment, and she needs to bring up the booth to match.

I love her use of the Barbie (R) couches as displays — very fun and it helps people make the connection to what the items are made out of. (But I agree with the people at the show that the Barbie (R) legs as displays are distracting.)

Raising the height of the tables, or not using tables at all, is a always a good idea. Putting some of her work in glass cases might help. Her work is expensive, yet it’s displayed as if it’s not. That could be part of the problem — expectations. You need to match people’s expectation of price with your display.

Her sign should be hanging from the back of the booth, not on the table. Her slogan on the sign, Unique Handcrafted Jewelry isn’t descriptive enough, lots of people use it. I would suggest she work on that, and come up with something that’s much more accurate and specific to her work, something that references the doll use.

And finally, Margaux talks in her post about her craftsmanship, how she makes everything except the chains herself, about how long it takes her to make each piece.

And there’s part of the problem. My suggestion to her is: look for ways to reduce your production time, ways to automate, improve efficiency.

She hand fabricates each setting for the doll parts. I would suggest that it can be hard to make money that way, and why not cast? It looks like she mostly makes jewelry using the ears and smiles of the dolls, and the dolls are pretty standarized, so it should work to make two or three settings and have them cast.

The placing of the doll part, adding any findings or a ring shank, and adding the epoxy resin would still be done individually to each piece.

There is a customer who appreciates hand fabrication, and perhaps she could go that way, and find those customers. The question is, is that customer the same customer as the one who appreciates fun, irreverent jewelry using doll body parts?

I think they are not the same person. (I could be wrong, but that’s my experience.) The customer who appreciates hand fabricated is, I think, older and has more money than the customer who has nostalgia for childhood toys and a strong sense of irreverence.

I think her customer is in her 20s or 30s and buys T-shirts at Threadless.

Knowing who your customer is, and making everything you do appropriate for that customer, is key to success. What’s the most important thing to her customer? Fine, hand craftsmanship, or great colors and a fun idea? I think the latter, and that for her customer, casting, and buying ear wires, are perfectly acceptable ways to reduce price.

If the goal is to make a living, the jewelry has to be designed from the start to be produced efficiently.

One of the greatest challenges in selling jewelry is standing out from the crowd, when there is so much competition. Lots of people make “pretty things,” and are not differentiated. Margaux has that covered! If she can communicate effectively what she’s doing, and produce efficiently she should do well.

I would also like to hear more about why she does this. I really like her work, and I’m also curious. Does she love Barbie (R) dolls? Does she hate them? Does she just think they look cool cut up and set in silver? Is she making a statement? About what?

People buy handcrafted jewelry in part of because they are buyinig a piece of the artist, a piece of their creativity. Knowing why she makes them, would only enhance the buying experience. And it could also make a great marketing angle, depending on the reason.

(c) 2007 Elaine Luther All Rights Reserved

Technorati Tags:
production, jewelry, sales, sell jewelry
Add to: | Technorati |