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?
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!
Mother’s Day is fast approaching — and we’re working on adding the option of further personalizing our modern family necklaces by having the option of engraving names on each Connection necklace ring (on both sides).
Here’s the first tiny personalized ring:
Our connection necklaces are already a great way of keeping your family close to your heart, and inscribing their names just makes it that much sweeter.
Update: The option is now available in the store:
Here’s a quick sneak peek to two upcoming additions to our modern necklace pendant line. We wanted to do a Twitter-inspired jewelry piece that was a little more guy-friendly, since there are plenty of women out there now how are sporting their own Twitter charmer necklaces.
Two months, we introduced the QR code cufflinks and we had always hinted that a QR pendant would be coming too! Expect them to be available for purchase by next week!
This is a little sneak peek of the Select Blend contemporary jewelry piece for October 2010. The first image shows some of the really quick sketches — and we do mean quick! — along with the first engraved wood prototype. The second image shows the final design, which is the same illustration, but done in the negative so that the whole elephant appears raised.
We’ve always wanted to do something with an elephant, because they’re a symbol of good luck — and I heard they were even more lucky if the trunk was pointed up.
The engraved wood elephant necklace will be available from October 1 to 31st, 2010. Once the month is done, it won’t be available again!
P.S. If you’re interested in seeing other new product sneak peeks, check out our Facebook page. We usually post photos there first ;)
© Blend Creations 2012
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