Jewelry Making

I’m currently working my way through a ton of email submissions… I need to set up some sort of official policy to handle these, but for now I just try to do them in the order received. Also, please remember there are so many that I can’t possibly write about all of you!

This one is from sharonunlimited.com, a fairly new online shop (actually, it opened only last month) created by Sharon Marzonie to provide unique jewelry making supplies and findings for artisans. They do have some nice things for sale there, so I decided to make a writeup.

A tiny bit from Sharon’s site:

“It is a place where artisans can come together to browse, shop and share in one anothers creativity … Our goal is to provide you with a unique offering of products and a high level of service that might be otherwise difficult to find.”

The site offers a good mixture of exotic and gemstone beads as well as sterling silver items like beads and buttons. They also sell Soft-Flex Beading Wire and interesting vintage Sari Bags. I particularly like the roughly hammered look to some of the artisans pendants, like this Salon Heart Pendant which is sterling silver and measure 17 x 17mm. It’s both elegant and natural looking at the same time.

There is a good selection of gemstone beads as well, ranging from more common stones like Aquamarine and Carnelian, to ones I haven’t really heard of like these Blue Kyanite Beads. Apparently named for the Greek, kyanos (which means blue) this is a really nice looking 7 and a half inch strand of 6mm “prussian-blue” teardrops.

Besides teardrop shapes, some other gemstones shapes available on the site include cylinders, rondelles, nuggets, rectangles, barrels. Interestingly, I rather appreciate the fact that many of the gemstones are of the blue/green persuasion… I usually see a glut of reds, yellows and oranges with very few cool color materials.

The sharonunlimited website can be found at: www.sharonunlimited.com/