Jewelry Making

I found out about Blend Creations through the Mighty Flirt site. The Canadian husband and wife team of Eric Jean-Louis and Vivian Cheng have created an array of interesting and unusual pendants. Using modern stainless steel as an exterior housing for more traditional Asian-inspired designs and materials, they create a unique, organic contrast in their jewelry.

Some of the different types of items used for these pendants inner designs include bone, bamboo, coral, mother of pearl and Japanese Washi paper.

A little blurb about their work from the Blend Creations website:

“Eric and Vivian find inspiration for their work in the design of everything from furniture to housewares to graphic art. By fusing hand-drawn design with automated manufacturing — imagery from the East with technology from the West — the creators of Blend Creations have become a rare blend, indeed.”

Here’s one of their creations that caught my eye. This “Orange Floral Washi” pendant features a tiny Washi square of colorful silkscreened flowers on an orange background. I think it’s pretty neat how they embed the different items into the steel background. They use acrylic in order to protect the paper. This tiny pendant measures about an inch square.

Here’s another piece that caught my eye. They also have quite a few mah jong tiles and numbers as focal points, but I like these hand-etched ox bone pieces of women dressed in traditional Japanese clothes. This particular one is called Yumi (meaning “beauty”)… I like how each of the pieces actually have different names attached to them.

I believe the pendants are all sold separately without any chain, although you can buy that part also from the site. In the pictures, many of them appear to be strung on suede cord which seems to be a nice way to display these pendants around your neck.

Besides the items being more unusual in design, one thing I really like about them is that many of them can be worn by guys as well, which is somewhat harder to find for jewelry. (And in fact, I think many of the pictures show Eric modeling them). But this is coming from a guy’s standpoint… in any case, you should check out these pendants for yourself.

You can find Blend Creations on the web at: www.blendcreations.com/