For all of you who love texting and/or whales, here’s a peek to a new design we’re working on.
(It’s just a prototype, so it’ll be a little while yet before we’ll have them available, but you’ll be able to personalize them with the text of your choice, including “·_______·” if you want :)
As evidenced by the recent Sneak Peek posts, it wouldn’t take a detective to figure out that we’ve been busy behind the scenes trying out new things with our laser-cutter that don’t involve jewelry.
Like many guys, Eric doesn’t actually wear jewelry all that often (even though he is half the driving force behind Blend Creations). With necessity being the mother of invention (yes, that link goes to one of Eric’s old “wallets” that he made out of paper. George Costanza is his hero), we’ve recently prototyped this lovely wallet, complete with a bit of bling:
As evidenced by the photos, Eric carries a lot of cra.. er.. stuff in his wallet: 15 cards, some big bills and various other slips of paper. This wallet carries it all with room to grow, especially since leather will stretch with use.
It’s a hand saddle-stitched leather wallet, using waxed cotton thread. The leather is of 4 oz. weight (about 1/16″ thick) and comes from cattle that has lived a full life. (The full hide has evidence of a brand, scars, bug bites and other interesting marks). We’re still playing around with various options, but we expect to be able to offer these soon at a price tag of around $100.
Let us know what you think!
Update: The wallets are now available in our store!
We’ve been playing around with wool felt and our laser cutter. It seems only natural that we put it to some good use, so we made this pretty coaster with our Flower Lace pattern.
What do you think?
Around the holidays, we made some special Christmas gifts — they were ornaments based on our child’s drawings (our 5 year old Jr. VP!).
We had a few requests to have custom ornaments available in the future and while it’s no longer the season, these things take time and we’ve put our thinking caps on! Behold, a first prototype in 100% wool felt, in a beautifully vibrant shade of red:
As fun as they were in acrylic, the ornaments are spindly which could lead to the little limbs snapping off, and frankly, it smells horrible to laser cut plastic. (Not to worry, our laser has a carbon filter, but it certainly does not smell like roses or anything good for you).
Wool felt on the other hand is quite pliable and doesn’t smell any worse than a hair dryer. We’ve washed the final product and there’s actually no residual odor.
So we’ve got our thinking caps on and will be experimenting with designs for some trivets and other household goods aside from the ornaments. What do you think?
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.
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We’ve just added a couple of new products to the store! Ever since we released the Worldly bottle-opener pendants, we’ve had requests to do both an American series and a Canadian series. Here’s the American series featuring the maps to the birthplaces of ten different microbrews:
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 :)
We’ve been tossing around ideas for more products that fall in line with our geek chic offerings and my friend and social media strategist Lara Wellman suggested doing a ‘hashtag’ necklace.
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!
About a month and a half ago, I showed a little work in progress which included a picture of an acrylic prototype:
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!
When we design new products, they always start with a sketch, then a production drawing and often a plastic prototype to get a good sense of what the piece will feel like physically.
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!
© Blend Creations 2012
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