Summer sale

We're having a summer sale on our paper-inlay necklaces and pendants, and this includes the Brazilian marbled paper and Nepalese paper pendants that were just added to the store:






If you've subscribed to our newsletter, then this is old news -- newsletter subscribers are always the first ones to find out about our sales. We send out a newsletter about once a month and each one has a coupon code that you can use for extra savings (even during sales like this one). It's pretty painless really :)

New paper inlays

New: Brazilian hand-marbled paper inlay necklaces

The Brazilian paper is marbled by hand-mixing and manipulating inks to produce swirling and streaked patterns in rich palettes of colours. The patterns may be similar but are not exactly alike and thus produces a unique and stunning accessory.

Also new: Nepalese paper inlay necklaces

These paper inlays are made by Fair Trade village co-ops from all over Nepal using fibre from the bark of the LamaLi Lokta -- a native and environmentally-sustainable shrub.

Anytime you want to see the most recent additions to the shop, just click on the "New Products!" link on any of the shop pages.

Want $5 to spend at Blend Creations?

Right now, we're asking people to fill out our survey so that we can hopefully learn what it is we're doing right, what it is we're doing wrong, and what we should be doing.

If you'd like to take a few minutes to fill out our survey, we'll send you a $5 Blend Creations gift certificate as a thanks for your time and input. Simple as that.

Oh, and if you fill it out before April 29, we'll be drawing for a $100 gift certificate amongst all those who've responded. The winner will be announced in our next newsletter.

So go, go now and answer a few little questions for us. Please? :)

Experiencing technical difficulties :/

Things have gone rather pear-shaped with our web host.
For a while, the site was completely down, and now there seem to be a few glitches appearing. We're in the process of upgrading servers.

Please bear with us!

Happy New Year!

Happy Chinese New Year!
It's the year 4706 according to the (lunar) Chinese calendar, and it's the year of the Rat.


In celebration of the occasion, you can use "RAT2008" in the coupon code, and save 15% off any orders of $100 or more (before shipping). The coupon code expires at midnight tonight, so take advantage of it! ;)

Merry Christmas, Happy holidays, Festivus, or what-have-you :)

Saw this via our friend Julia, (Hi Hula!), It's the a capella group "Straight No Chaser" of Indiana University. (I have a weakness for humourous, a capella music).



Anyhow, we'll be on holidays until January 1st, which means any orders that come in at that time won't begin shipping out until January 2nd.

Hope you all have a wonderful and restful holiday. We like to celebrate Christmas with our families, and typically we do something for Festivus by dragging out the ol' aluminum pole and air out some grievances. The feats of strength are difficult, since our living room is rather small. ;)

Plushie! for the pattern impaired

Saw this via BoingBoing:


It's "Plushie: an interactive design system for plush toys". It's a little interactive program that allows someone who couldn't draw a pattern to save their life (me! me!) to create patterns for 3D plush toys. They've got a link for the demo program (see under 'Demonstrations'), but it's for Windows only and not for us lowly mac users. It looks intriguing enough though, that I'm willing to unearth my old, loud PC to give it a shot.

I've made plushies in the past, but they've been more along the lines of fluffified flat shapes, as evidenced by these:


These are my version of Eric's parents, done in miniature, about 5" high, with cardboard versions of their furniture. It was part of their Christmas gift a couple of years ago, and it's been hard to top... I figure the gift of the grand-child will just have to suffice now.

In any case, I'm already thinking I'd like to try more 3D plushies when there's actually time. (Time?)

Oh and FYI: next Tuesday the 18th is our last day for taking orders. Then we're closing shop until New Year's. We'll still be around answering emails though. And if you're stuck for a gift, and don't want to do the panicked, last-minute shipping, we've always got gift certificates.

A nice surprise

We got a nice little surprise yesterday. It turns out Blend Creations was featured in the yesterday's Ottawa Citizen. We were mentioned in "The Ottawa 100-mile gift guide", under the heading "For the glitterati".

Basically, the gift guide promotes the idea of "local shopping for global change" -- shopping locally as a small way of reducing your carbon footprint on the planet. Now, I realize that most of our customers are not actually local, and we really, really appreciate each and every customer who has purchased from us, and enjoyed our products. It is nice to get some local recognition though :)

So, if you're from Ottawa and found us through the Citizen, "hi!".
If you're not from Ottawa and reading this, why not try "local shopping for global change" in your area -- support your local artists and independant, small businesses. (That being said, I think we'll have to get a "Rim Roller" the next time we're at Lee Valley...).

You can read part of the 100-mile gift guide here. The "For the glitterati" section is here.

(Note: I'm not sure how long the Citizen actually keeps stories active in their online archive).

Last week's contest winner

Congratulations to Audrey Larson of Bloomington, MN.
She's last week's mi-SPA/Blend Creations mi-COLLAB winner of a 20" coral bells foliage necklace.


That's 3 winners down with one last drawing to go. Enter this week by using this form, and get an extra ballot for each purchase you make at Blend Creations or mi-SPA
.

BIG! GINORMOUS! SALE!

Hey, what are you doing reading this?
Blend Creations is having a sale today! (In fact, I should probably be in the shop filling orders...)

The sale's for 24-hours only, so go check it out now.

If you're still reading this and you feel like buying me a present, I just saw Kristen's (of Cool Mom Picks' fame) cool "Mominatrix" t-shirts:


They're $30 and I want one. This is mostly a hint for Eric to go buy me something ;)

New products, and pssst, there's going to be a SALE!

Have you seen our latest of pretty new things?





Those are two of our new laser-engraved wood-inlay stainless steel necklaces and pendants (say that 5 times fast). As you can see, we've been putting our laser-cutter to good use :)

And in other news -- we're going to be having a SALE this Friday, aka "Black Friday". A number of our most popular items are going to be on sale at more than 20% off. The deal is even sweeter if you're privvy to any of our coupon codes since the codes WILL WORK on sales items for extra money saved.

Happy shopping!

Last week's contest winner

Congratulations to last week's Blend Creations + mi-SPA mi*COLLAB winner: Stacey Brown of Shippensburg, PA!

Stacey chose this set of our lovely laser-cut blank cards, the "Broken Baroque": Emblem 2 set:




So, that's one winner, with three more to go.

We draw EVERY WEEK with a whole new batch of ballots, so if you entered last week and didn't win, then make sure you enter the contest again this week (and the week after, and the week after that).

For more details, and a contest ballot, just go here.

Our foray into the land of cute

We've just added a new line of pendants to Blend Creations: Chinese zodiac pendants.

This year is the year of the pig. (It'll be the year of the pig until the next Chinese new year, February 7, 2008).


The illustrations were taken straight from the pages of our sketchbooks, and while we're responsible for all of them, we each have our favourites. Eric's is the "rat":

(Just so you know, next year is the year of the rat!)

My favourite is the "dragon":

I like him best probably because I thought he would be the hardest to illustrate, but he just kind of flew onto the page.

Both Eric and I were born in the year of the "tiger",

so he's a bit special that way -- and now, if you do the math, you can hazard a pretty good guess as to both our ages. (Yes we're old! ;) but we still like cute things). You can see the full set of Chinese zodiac pendants here.

Win a foliage necklace

If you like our foliage necklaces, you can try your luck at winning one at Cool Mom Picks. See their posting on our necklaces for details on how to enter the contest. It's TODAY ONLY, as it closes at Midnight (EST) tonight.

The prize is the necklace of your choice including this pretty butterfly delphinium necklace:


If you're looking for a hint for their skill-testing question, maybe you should check out our 'about' page. ;)

We're in the Modish gift guide!

Okay, so every year it seems as though the Christmas decorations come out sooner than the previous year and now they're out even before the Hallowe'en costumes are put on clearance.

However, in the defence of the small indie business, we have to start thinking about the holidays earlier since there's no off-shore factory churning out our goods. That being said, this year, why not support the little guy and shop indie!

Indie businesses are usually one- or two-person (in our case) businesses that put all their creativity, love and enthusiasm into the selection of products that you see on their site. If they're anything like us, everything from the original sketch to the manufacturing to finally the photographs of the product, are made by the people who just 'run the store'.

A great source of other indie businesses this year is the Modish gift guide, assembled by Jena Coray of the blog Modish.


See the guide here. There are categories for her, him, teens, babies, eco-friendly gifts and more.

Happy shopping!

Foliage!

What better to do on a lovely Friday night than to update the site, I say! See the prettiness that are the new round 'foliage' necklaces:

This is the geranium leaf:



And here's the coral bells:


I've just put up those and eleven other foliage necklaces. Expect a few more in the coming weeks though, as we'll be adding new ones whenever we get the chance!

*sigh*

*UPDATE on October 6, 2007*: Okay, so we still can't process payments through the website, which is more than a little annoying, but we are able to send out PayPal invoices for the orders, and payments to the invoices are being processed. So that's a small victory. Now if only we can sort out the rest of our PayPal woes.

We've got a little bit of a site issue thanks to PayPal. :/
It seems that PayPal.com is not working to it's full capacity and while it seems that I can actually log-in now (where I couldn't even do that earlier...), no payments seem to be making it through. We'll still be able to receive your orders, but we won't be able to process payments until PayPal gets their act together.

Today was supposed to be a good day since, if you've gone to our site, we've gotten a big update thanks to Aeolidia Design! (Shoshanna has been awesome to work with! And Arianne too!) So if you're looking for some people who know their way around a shopping cart, I highly recommend them.

If you look around the site, you'll notice that we've restocked our ever-popular ox bone pendants. Even more exciting than that is we've added these spiffy new round necklace designs:


and with the help of a handy-dandy laser-cutter, we've now got these pretty laser-cut paper goods:


So happy surfing around our new site and think happy thoughts for us that PayPal will be up and running for us again soon.

Cool Mom Picks Blogher contest winners

Congrats to bloggers Elizabeth Edwards and Dana Tsuke for winning the washi pendants in the Cool Mom Picks BlogHer photo scavenger hunt!

Way to go ladies!

Are you going to BlogHer?

BlogHer is this big consortium of women bloggers, and every year, there's a conference where all the women bloggers meet up. This year, Cool Mom Picks is putting on The Great BlogHer Photo Scavenger Hunt.

What does this have to do with us here at Blend Creations? Well, you (and your partner, if you decide to work in a pair) could win a washi necklace of your choice as one of the prizes. Full details are here:


Have fun to those of you who are going to BlogHer and good luck to those of you who enter the contest!

In an attempt to blog again

As you can see, the blogging on our site has been sporadic at best. And even then, the word 'sporadic' is probably too generous and should be replaced with 'rare' or 'once in a blue moon'.

It had been so long since the last posting, I'd forgotten the password to the blogger account. In fact, I'd not only forgotten the password, but I'd forgotten the actual username. Though, in part, that would be Google's fault :P since they took over blogger and I have two gmail accounts and that involved a mess of even finding the blog.

So that's a good way to make a short story long. What's been going on in the mean time? Well, I could say that we've been busy dreaming up new designs (we have, but they're a ways from being in production). I could also say that we've been busy filling orders (we were for a while after we re-stocked), but things are finally calming down a bit.

The reality is probably closer to being tired (comes with feeling like an often clueless first-time mom) and lazy (the perpetual to-do list is hard to tackle) and the idea of updating the blog falls somewhere after the idea of maybe vacuuming under the desk now and then. That, and Facebook and reading cupcake blogs seemed to be a better way to use waste time most days.

So in the lull of finally feeling like we know what we're doing as parents, we've been slinging Jack around quite happily in the summer weather. Rather than exhaust all of what I might have to say for the next little while, I'll leave you all with a picture of Eric slinging Jack, and hopefully over the next bit, the blog posts will be rolling out once again :)



P.S. The sling is from Lucky Baby. Both Eric and I each have one (since they aren't adjustable) and Jack is quite content to be 'slung' around with his hippy parents since it lets him see the world from a higher perspective than from his stroller and we're quite happy with them as well :)