We WON!

Hillary Won this month's eSMArts Challenge! You can see what she had to say about winning here.
You can see her explanation of the inspiration behind the piece she created here. We are utterly thrilled and cannot describe how giddy Hillary is! Thank you to everyone who voted!

eSMArts updates and challenges

eSMArts announced their Santa Giveaway winner!

The eSMArts voting for the October/November challenge is up. The last day to vote will be Wed 12//09 at midnight EST. Look on this blog in the next few days for a detailed post on the piece we entered.

Next Month's challenge has been posted and the theme is "winter". Check the eSMArts Blog around the first of January to see the beautiful creations of the team members.

announcements, project progress and charity!

Hillary promises she has been working on the project she gave herself, but says she doesn't have pictures yet. In the meantime, here are some other things we wanted you to knoe about:

- Mario Marathon is doing a fundraiser for Child's Play, a charity founded by gamers to provide children's hospitals with much needed toys, video game systems and other forms of entertainment for the children in said hospitals and their families. We contribute 20% of our sales to this Charity every year from about Thanksgiving to about Christmas. Since our founder is a die hard video and board gamer, she wanted to make sure you knew about this fundraiser for one of her favorite charities.

- There may be a cross business personal jewelry design challenge in the works, but Hillary is waiting to post on it until she has made more progess on her original self-challenge.

- Hillary reached 200 followers on twitter and wants to celebrate! We are offering free shipping and free gifts to anyone who types "TW200" in the customer comments section of their order. Both Happy Hippy and Artful Unity are participating in this sale. This sale was originally slated to end tonight at midnight but it has been extended to Wednesday at midnight.

- Lastly, we have been working hard at trying to produce weekly content for our blog. We don't simply want this to be a collections of link lists, a bunch of unrelated posts or a mirror of Hillary's other blogs. We aim to keep this blog filled with interesting content and well thought out posts. To this end, we have decided to decrease our official posting schedule to twice a month. We will try to keep to once every two weeks, but, depending on scheduling and time needed for articles we are working on, it may work out differently. Also, if we have enough content for more than 2 posts per month, we will certainly post it. We are sorry to have to announce this decrease, but we see no other way to maintain and improve the quality of our posts.

My amazing ADHD

Hillary has been diagnosed with ADHD since she was 19. Lately it has been taking a prominent role in her life, and it brought about some thoughts she wanted to share:

My brain works very differently from most other people's and it's hard to even explain sometimes. This makes life very difficult in the corporate world, because ADHD people are not good at things like error free data enter and other repetitive, mundane tasks. What they are good at is coming up with ideas that other people wouldn't and making connections that other people would miss. These are very valuable skills to have as a worker, as an artist and as a person. My ADHD is a big part of why I started making jewelry, and then why I wanted to do more and work differently, which eventually led to being here. It is why I have to do jewelry and dance and art, and why I love them so much. Those with ADHD often have a creative nature, and are often quirky. Quirky creativity describes me and what I do to a tee. I love creating new jewelry and new sketches, and I love coming up with new ideas.

ADHD opens new doors, but it erases some altogether. I will never be able to consistently remember to turn off the lights, enter numbers correctly every time, catch all grammar errors and typos when proofreading, find my keys when I need them, not leave piles of papers and stuff in the house, or intrinsicly understand what organized is. It doesn't matter how hard I try, certain things will never happen the way everyone would like.

That said, I wouldn't give up my ADHD. Like I said, it's part of what drives me to create and part of what makes my creations so different. Without the drive to create and the drive to try new things, there might not be an Artful Unity. Most people with one jewelry business, wouldn't necessarily move on to 2. I, however, had to try it or it would drive me crazy for the rest of my days.

I love myself, who I am, what I create, and my life. None of these things would be the same without my ADHD. I would be a different person, which is the last thing I want. Some days, I wish that I didn't have certain problems that come with the ADHD and some days I wish I could be a little more like everyone else so that we could understand each other. However, if it went away, I don't know that I would ever come up with the unique ideas I do
or be driven enough to pick up a pen and pencil to sketch them knowing that I am most definitely not a sketch artist. But, I am who I am: the designs jump into my head and beg to be made. I don't have the right materials to make them, so they beg me not to forget them; so, I sketch.



Thanks to my ADHD, there's one more design that won't be forgotten, and one more idea that has a chance to become a beautiful piece of jewelry. How crazy and how awesome is that?

New Artistry and Sketches

Hillary has drawn some sketches for ideas that she has for custom work. She created this jewelry business because she wanted to work on her artistry and work in new ways. She felt that drawing sketches would improve her artistry, help her see things in new ways and give customers a chance to customize an idea to their liking before it's actually made.

This first piece would be made from a square or cube gemstone bead wrapped with wire covered with czech glass beads in a complementary color. Hillary has some great corner drilled dark brown jasper cubes that would make a very elegant but funky necklace if combined with gold, copper or shiny brown beads. However a flat square/diamond in a more pastel color with pastel czech glass would work well for making jewelry with a softer but still elegant and unique look.




The second piece of jewelry is an assymetrical pair of earrings. They are made from chain and various types of high quality beads all in a similar color family. Hillary's original vision was for these to be made of high quality glass including some facted czech glass beads, but this would also work well with gemstones or pearls.

The original idea came from a custom request listed on etsy for bridesmade earrings for a dress that had a wide strap on one side, and no strap on the other. Hillary thought that having a two different earrings might be an interesting way to draw attention to the asymmetry of the dress while still balancing the overall look. This design would work well with any outfit, but Hillary thinks it would look most stunning with strapless or asymmetrical dresses.




The next piece is a necklace made primarily of silver. Silver chain and a silver triangular spacer are accented by small tear-drop shaped beads, and a larger, wire wrapped teardrop bead.

Hillary's original vision involved a Bali silver spacer but other hand-made silver, including Thai, would work well. Hillary envisions vintage glass for the teardrops, but told us that bright gemstones would be beautiful of their own right and would make the piece even bolder.




The final sketch is a set that would involve a lot of intricate wire work. It features wire wrapped teardrop beads with smaller beads worked into some of the wire wrapping. For the necklace, a wire heart covered in small beads surrounds the wire wrapped bead. The bracelet is made from wire wrapped beads with chain in between. The earrings are dangles made with wire wrapped teardrop beads.

For the large beads, Hillary envisions vintage glass or pearls, but gemstones would work as well. For the small beads, Hillary said that she likes the idea of Czech glass and crystals about equally.

Hillary stated that many color combinations would work well on this, but her three favorite ideas are iridescent white on clear or white, shiny royal blue on royal blue, or different shades of green. Contrasting colors would work on this set as well, but the combination would have to be carefully chosen as the design of the set is already very decorative and attention getting.



Thank you for viewing our sketches and we hope you enjoyed them. We will be listing some of these in the next few days on our Etsy site as custom items available for purchase. If you would like us to make one of these for you or make a sketch for you based on your own designs, please let us know. Also, if you have ideas or comments for us or for Hillary, by all means feel free to comment here or convo us on Etsy. Have a beautiful week.

Family love for our designs

A few weeks ago, Hillary posted about a family necklace that she re-purposed. Hillary's aunt had given her a broken crystal neckalce and suggested she re-string it for another family member. Here is that aunt's response to the pictures of the creation made from those crystals:

Hill

I am in awe. Your great grandmother would be so pleased. You vision left Grandma Nina's crystals in a creation that is timeless and that she herself would have worn. Soooo pleased with your work.

Our family certainly is lucky to have such talent.

Love and Miss you
Aunt G

She also told Hillary that it would be fine to use the leftover crystal for a necklace for herself. Be on the lookout for a future post on that piece as Hillary will post it here as soon as she is done with it.

Our favorites List

If you read our sister blog, you may already know that Hillary is going to be own of town starting Thursday to participate in the Panoply Choreography Competition. We wanted to post something interesting but not labor intensive, so we're going to share a few people on our Etsy favorites list with you.

Star of the East- Unique jewelry featuring real Turkish sea urchins.

KRT Woodworking - Beautiful woodworking including some of the most skillfully made jewelry boxes we've ever seen.

Samantha Sultana - Great handmade accessories and nighties with a vintage flair.

Magnolija Dress - Beautifully made dresses and fabric accessories.

Doloris Petunia - Fabulous statement necklaces that have a great balance of elegance and funk.

Eden's Wake - Gorgeous handmade bags and pouches.

Have a great weekend and w'll see you back here next week!

Self Expression through fashion part 1.

We are all about elegant individuality and showing off who you are, be that a traditional Fashionista, or someone who's a little offbeat. Later spring and early summer bring on proms, graduations, and lots of weddings. We thought we'd put out some ideas on how you can make your couture speak for you, and we'd love to hear your ideas too, so feel free to leave comments!

Part 1. Handmade Dresses:

Be it made by a professional seamstress, your neighbor, your aunt, or even you, a handmade dress gives you a chance to express yourself and look your best in a very unique way. You can pick the color, the fabric, and, most importantly, the measurements. A dress that fits your measurements can accentuate your body much better than one made to an average, like most commercially available clothing. In fact, we recommend if you do decide to go with a commercially available or otherwise pre-made dress, that you get it altered to fit your measurements.

Here are a few of our picks from etsy:
-GaiaConceptions has a great custom made evening style dress. What makes it even more unique is that it is made from organic cotton fabric made in the seamstress' area.
-Ruby Pearl's shop features this surprising gown that expresses a style reminiscent of classic movies like Gone with the Wind
-This silk dress from Bon Bon features classic lines paired with careful craftsmanship
-My Black Dress features a number of classy and sassy little black dresses including this adorable asymmetrical gown.
-This emerald green and leopard print formal from Miss Brache's is sure to get you noticed
-If you think that was offbeat, try this incredible necktie ballgown from Glamarita.

And now, we'll finish off the list with some awe inspiring wedding gowns:

-This simple but elegant dress from Natural Bridals is eco-friendly as well as gorgeous.
-You would never know that this was made by 5 ladies who run a family business in Tennesee. The pictures show that Gioavanni's gowns rival many designer gowns that I've seen in both style and attention to detail.
-Threadhead Creations provides with another unique eco-friendly gown
-Last but not least, AbstractPretty has several great wedding dresses including this frilly but modern sheath gown.

That's it for this installment. Keep an eye out for the "accessories" sequel in a later blog post. Have a great week!

Materials and future pieces

Materials we like and why:
We thought we would share with you some of the materials we like to work with. All of the beads pictured are materials we currently have on hand and would like to use in pieces in the near future.



Semi Precious Gems - We like them because they have natural beauty and come in a lot of great colors. They're also generally durable (depending on the specific stone), and if well cut and polished, don't break easily. Pictured here are rose quartz (clear pink), sodalite (dark blue), tigerseye (golden brown), and lapidolite (purple), among others. Semi-precious gems are a good combination of quality and price as they are generally very affordable.



Freshwater Pearls - We like them because they have a shiny, soft and almost silky appearance. They look elegant without being boring or stuffy. Pictured here are white rice pearls (center) and mauve potato pearls (center). Pearls can range in price quite a bit depending on size and quality. The pearls pictured here are very affordable.



Swarovski Crystal - We like it because it's sparkly and fiery but still has a very clean appearance. Lines and shapes of crystal beads appear very well defined because of the way they refract light. In addition, Swarosvki is an instantly recognizable name, and they have earned their reputation by producing high quality lead crystals for over a century. Crystal is more expensive than some other materials, but it has a similar sparkle and apperance to high quality, well cut precious gems, and is much lower in price.




Czech Fire Glass - We like it because it's sparkly, soft in appearance, and more affordable than crystal. It also contains no lead.



Above is a comparison of Czech glass and crystal. The top, blue bead, is Czech glass and the bottom, pink bead, is crystal. Both of these beads have an aurora borealis finish.
As you can see, they both have their own unique qualities and, as a result, have unique applications. In some instances, they can be substituted for each other depending on preference and budget, but certain situations call for one over the other.
If you're looking for maximum flash and refraction, crystal is the way to go, but if you are trying for a nice sparkle without sharpness, then Czech glass is great for that. Czech glass goes better with stones with a more "natural" look such as freshwater pearls or semi-precious gems. Crystal, on the other hand, goes well with other beads with clean lines like saltwater cultured pearls and Swarovski crystal pearls.

Examples of Work with These Materials:
All of the materials we talked about today make exceptionally nice prom, anniversary wedding and family jewelry.


Above is a necklace set Hillary made for a bride. The two stones are the bride and groom's birthstone.







Above are a pair of earrings and a matching pendant made from Czech glass. They were Christmas presents on two separate years from a husband to his wife. The colors chosen represent the birthstones of the mother, father and child.

Materials we would like to obtain in the future:
High quality precious gems. They are beautiful, very sparkly, and highly desired by many. They provide clean lines, and unique, natural colors.

South Sea and Cultured Saltwater Pearls. They have the same shiny, silky appearance as the freshwater pearls above, but the lines are cleaner, they perfectly round, and they are uniform in appearance.

Welcome and Philosophy

Welcome to Artful Elaborations, the blog for Artful Unity, A new jewelry venture founded in late 2008 by Hillary Wilson, the artist and proprietor of Happy Hippy Jewelry (also known to many as Hippybeads). Artful Unity was started because Hillary felt that she wanted to explore and grow more as an artist while still creating the more familiar, down to earth items of Hippybeads. Artful Unity's focus will be high quality artistic jewelry. "I want to make sophisticated items for those with a unique sense of style. When I say I want to create high quality items, I am by no means saying that I want to create stuffy, bland or commonplace jewelry. I want to create items that I would be proud to wear for a formal evening out or at a wedding." says Ms. Wilson. Plans for our product line include sterling silver wrapped pendants, wedding jewelry, unique earrings, and creations with gemstones and pearls.