4/4/05 | Texas Haute Sauce
I had seen the website for these folks before through involvement with The Sampler, but came across them again while looking at different jewelry sites. I just remembered the unusual name for a diy craft biz! Sisters Erika and Kristina Buentello sisters team up with Mandi Demars-Muhic to to create a variety of handmade crafts including soap, necklaces, bracelets, paper, cosmetic bags, and purses.
A short blurb from their website:
Texas Haute Sauce is an online shop created by Erika Buentello. It features the work of Erika, her sister, Kristina Buentello and the uber-talented, Mandi Demars-Muhic. The goal of Texas Haute Sauce is to create fresh, beautiful, funky, strange, funny, edgy, unique creations that appeal those of us with discriminating and sometimes unusual tastes. We create high quality pieces that are limited edition or one-of-a-kind.
Jennafer Bryan and Michelle Fowler make up the jewelry design team behind The Scarlet Poppy. Many of their pieces are both elegant and airy in composition, though there are a few that are bolder in design as well. They make quite a good selection of necklaces, bracelets and earrings, and they also have a few items for “tots” as well. The focus seems to range from various standard precious stones like chalcedony, jade, turquoise, and quartz to an interesting greenish stone called Prehnite that I’m not familiar with. I believe that the majority of their pieces are unique.
I stumbled across some really cool pins from Happy Owl Glassworks the other day. These square pins are about an inch across and are created out of fused glass. Head Owl Tracy offers a good selection of animals on her glass pins so you have quite a few choices including the following: fawn, owl, bunny, squirrel, porcupine, ladybug, damselfly and chess piece. I like how many of the glass pieces aren’t pure white or clear but feature very nice background color choices for the glass like olive green, powder blue and purple.
Kiona from Lucky Accessories uses beads and precious stones to create fun but elegant accessories. Many of her items are limited editions or even one of a kind pieces. She offers both simple and fancy necklaces, earrings, rings, bracelets, brooches and hairpins that seem quite affordable for their complexity.
For those who are currently avoiding sweets like cakes and cupcakes (for various individual reasons of course), you can live vicariously through these delicious looking dessert necklaces from Pancake Meow. Leslie from Pancake Meow site makes miniature cupcakes, cake slices, waffles, doughnuts and ice cream sandwiches and strings them on bead elastic to make delectable treats to wear around your neck.
If you’re running a small jewelry or craft business and are looking for a really fun way to promote your products, you should take a look at The Sampler. Marie from The Sampler started up this service in August of 2004. Basically, every month people sign up for a nominal fee to receive a really fun variety package containing tons of indie craft samples including things like jewelry, handsewn pouches, soap, buttons, stickers, zines, candles, bookmarks, magazines, CDs and more! DIY Craft businesses are the ones that provide the actual samples, which acts as a promotional tool for them to get their name out there. There are different tiers of sample contribution, ranging from people who contribute only a few one-of-a-kind special items, to magazines who contribute 200+ copies.
For those of you who are allergic to metals and are always on the lookout for jewelry alternatives, you should check out the rings at The Carrotbox. A lot of folks who can’t wear metal jewelry resort to making DIY non-metallic out of beads, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s just sometimes you’d like to be able to BUY a piece of jewerly that you can wear. It seems like non-metallic rings are particularly difficult to find because the band of a ring is almost always made of metal, even if the stones and pieces set in/on it are not. Necklaces and bracelets are more frequently completely non-metallic. 
