If you’re a fan of Blend Creations on Facebook, you’ll recognize our new hashtag circle pendants. They’re part of our geek chic line and celebrate social media trends offline, in-person (or around your neck!). If you’re not sure what a #hashtag is, you can read all about them on Twitter’s page, “What are Hashtags?“.

Also new in the store is our Custom map disc bottle-opener pendants. We started with our Worldly series (featuring maps to the birthplaces of international brews), and then added our American and Canadian brew series.

The problem was, there are just too many great craft and micro- brews out there to add them all, not to mention all of the fine home-brews that exist. So now, you can get a custom bottle-opener pendant featuring whatever location you’d like, and we’ll make a pendant with that specific map.

The back of the pendants are even personalized — so you can commemorate any place (not just breweries) that has significant meaning for you (like where you met your spouse, where your child was born or where you first made that great IPA, etc.).

We’ve just added our newest design to the store – our Fusion necklaces! There are three styles: the assymetric fusion, the petite fusion and the long fusion.

They’re so-named because each necklace has two pieces of stainless steel: one with a brushed finish and one with a polished finish, that have been fused together. They’re modern and simple-looking, but can be quite symbolic of a union. Each necklace is personalized with a visual accent: either a Swarovski crystal in birthstone colors, or a faux-pearl. You can further personalize it with the engraving of initials, a date or a special word.

Want to stay updated of our new product designs and get a special promo code? You can join our e-mail newsletter, or go to our Facebook page.

In the meantime, we’re preparing for our own celebrations and our Jr. VP has certainly helped out by designing some ornaments:

Santa and his elves? Nope. The Jr. VP did a self-portrait and drew his best bear friends, which we turned into ornaments.

We hope you and yours have a wonderful and restful holiday season :)

Here’s the Canadian series with maps to the birthplaces of seven different brewery birthplaces:

We’ve also added a #hashtag tab pendant (in the same style as our ‘at’ symbol twitter pendant):

It’s one of many products in our ‘geek chic’ collection of products and great for someone you know who’s a Twitter fanatic :)

The holidays are just around the corner and if you’re shopping for holiday gifts you’ll want to make sure that they arrive to your recipient in time.

Here are a couple of order deadlines you’ll want to keep in mind:

Friday November 25th:
- Order deadline for shipping internationally (outside of Canada & the US)

Friday December 9th:
- Order deadline for shipping to the US and Canada (outside of Ontario) using our $7 standard (Expedited Parcel) shipping method.

Friday December 16th:
- Order deadline for shipping within Ontario using our $7 standard (Expedited Parcel) shipping method.
- Order deadline for shipping to the US and Canada (outside of Ontario) using our Xpresspost/FedEx Ground method.

Monday December 19th:
- Order deadline for shipping within Ottawa, ON using our $7 standard (Expedited Parcel) shipping method.
- Order deadline for shipping within Ontario using our Xpresspost/FedEx Ground method.
- Order deadline for shipping within Canada/US using our Courier method.

Tuesday December 20th – Monday December 26th:
- Orders placed during this time will start shipping out on Tuesday December 27th.

For full details, and shipping costs, consult our shipping table.

In case you’re wondering what a hashtag is, (it took many moons of being on Twitter before I realized what one was), the Twitter Fan Wiki says:

“Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.”

In any case, we sketched out some ideas, and weren’t really happy with any of them until we made this plastic prototype:

We’ve received enough feedback via Twitter that we’ll add it to our line-up within the next few months!

Well, here’s an update in photo (and stainless steel) form:

The pendant is mirror-polished stainless steel, while the little maze marker is black ion-plated stainless steel.

We plan on offering this and another pendant design as pre-orders soon — we’ll update as soon as we have an idea of when you can order, when we expect them to be ready and of course, how much.

Update: The labyrinth pendant and the disc bottle openers are now available for pre-order!

Any shipments that were stalled in the Canadian Postal system will be in transit starting tomorrow. As such, our flat-rate shipping method (Expedited Parcel to Canada/USA and Air Mail Small Packet International) will resume as normal with shipments going out with Canada Post starting this Tuesday.

We’re currently working on a Labyrinth pendant which would include a little maze marker that you can actually move. (Of course, the final product would be made of stainless steel and not plastic),

While the prototype isn’t nearly as robust as the final product would be, it’s already a lot of fun to play with!

Without any advance warning, Canada Post has announced that it has suspended operations across the country.

Please be advised that this is particularly important for international shipments since we will NOT be able to ship out orders outside of Canada and the US until the disruption is resolved. (While courier shipping is available internationally, please be advised that this method usually costs $50+ to most countries.)

For our Canadian and American customers, we will automatically upgrade our $7 flat-rate shipping to be FedEx Ground (normally $15 Canada/$20 US) at no extra cost to you, and your order will arrive between 1-6 business days depending on your location.

Orders in the Ottawa, ON area will be delivered by local courier.

Our apologies for any inconvenience in these extraordinary circumstances.