FREE BRONZE SAMPLES! When you order $10+ of bronze, take $10 OFF your total with coupon code: BRONZE. Choose your own samples – they’re on us. But hurry! Offer good only through November 2011. This gives you just over a week to get your bronze samples for FREE!
Try all three finishes: Solid Bronze, Silver Plated Bronze, and Gold Plated Bronze. You’ll fall in love with the variety of charms and pendants we now offer in bronze. And, more is on the way! At these prices, who can afford NOT to grow their collection.
NEW Bronze Clasps and Earring Findings from Bali just arrived too. The Balinese silversmiths worked diligently to formulate the best bronze alloy so that it is soft enough to hammer and shape, yet hard enough to take the torch. We also had to consider the color of the bronze alloy. We wanted it to match the bronze used to cast the Thai bronze charms and pendants. We are very pleased with the outcome. The Bali bronze has a rich luster, a warm burnished color, and is expertly finished. They are gorgeous.
Remember – with the coupon code: BRONZE you can sample $10 worth of the bronze findings for FREE!
Bronze Clasps
One of the most enjoyable parts of my job at Nina Designs is sketching and designing many of the Silver Pendants and Charms we carry. The ideas for new styles originate from a variety of places: a mod 1960s style chandelier, a beautiful sprig of wildflowers appreciated during an evening walk, holiday themes like Day of the Dead, or inspiring photos from National Geographic. Both Nina and I have always admired ocean sea fans. They are delicate and lacy, yet sturdy enough to withstand strong sea tides.
Below are my sketches from our design process. We wanted the sea fan pendants to look both flowing and organic (not always easy in hard sterling silver). After completing the final sketch, I sent the specifications to Thailand, where talented silversmiths made a master model. Often, samples require several revisions before we’re satisfied with the final result. In this example, the sea fans needed just one round of modifications to reach perfection!
What inspires your creations?
Sea Fan: from sketches to final product
Be careful when shopping for sterling silver charms at tradeshows these days. I was perusing booths at an InterGem Show last week and noticed vendors are getting quite creative about what they’re calling base metals. For instance, one booth was selling nickel and calling it German silver. While this may technically be legal, it is definitely misleading. I’m certain there are similar terms out there that are just as misleading. Please be careful, especially in terms of allergies and high levels of lead and cadmium content. If you are unsure of what something is be sure to ask.
For more than 25 years, Nina Designs has been designing unique sterling silver charms and beads. But with the price of silver doubling in just one year, we know times are changing. We understand many of our customers want an alternative to sterling, and that as jewelry designers you’ve had to make some difficult business and financial decisions. We have done the same.
After much consideration and research, we developed Natural Bronze, Silver Plated Bronze, and Gold Plated Bronze as low cost alternatives to our sterling silver and gold vermeil. Our bronze is a high quality alloy of copper and tin we sourced from Italy. With our bronze collection you get it all: the beauty and quality you’ve come to expect from Nina Designs, and for a fraction of the cost of sterling silver!
Learn more about our bronze atBronze FAQs, and about how Nina Designs complies with laws regulating metal jewelry.
Discover what's new at Nina Designs!
Since we introduced our line of bronze charms and pendants, we’ve received several inquiries regarding matching jewelry findings, like chains and jump rings. We are working on it, and will have something for you soon. We want to be sure that any new bronze or brass products we offer are the same quality you have come to expect from Nina Designs. Thanks for your patience!
In the meantime, we’d like to suggest pairing our bronze charms with gold fill chain and gold fill jewelry findings. As you can see from the photos, they look great together. The color of the bronze that we offer looks a lot like 14K gold. It has a warm golden hue and is less brown in color than much of the bronze finishes on the market. However, just like all bronze, over time our bronze will form a warm brown patina when exposed to air and the elements. We are currently testing this process and will report specific results soon. We understand that using gold filled chain is not the low cost alternative you may be looking for. We plan to offer affordable chain alternatives to match our bronze line soon.
In terms of earring findings, we will soon offer some of our popular Bali silver earrings in bronze. For handmade styles, the bronze alloy of copper and tin has to be modified to be a bit softer so it can be hand forged. We are working diligently on getting the best formula that has a lovely color and is the correct hardness. It is a fine balance. We will start to offer Bali style earrings and jewelry links in the upcoming months.
Another quick recommendation is mixing metals. I designed the earrings below to show how terrific our Bali silver earring tops look with the bronze bee charm. I think the result is fantastic. And, I used gold fill wire throughout all these designs with excellent results. We are happy to have our bronze line so well received and will soon offer all the supporting cast needed for a complete collection!
Mix your metals: bronze charm with sterling earring findings
Bronze charm with gold fill chain
Bronze charm with gold fill wire and chain
The difference between the silver charms and jewelry findings we offer and those you find at the large one-stop online bead stores is that we design the vast majority of ours in house. This means we sketch jewelry findings into life. Based on our sketches, silversmiths make samples for our approval. The samples may or may not work, and most will go through several revisions. This entire process can take several months to complete, and means we offer you only our best.
Designing in-house also gives us the flexibility to continually improve our products based on your feedback. For example, the chubby teardrop links you see here have always been great sellers, which is why when we started hearing some criticisms we responded quickly. Several customers began requesting a little loop be added to the top so they stay in place. Others prefer the jewelry link without the loop, so now we offer both versions. Making these small tweaks is something we are happy to do for you, our valued customers. In fact, we love receiving this type of feedback because we strive to offer the best and to constantly improve our products.
Please feel free to leave requests for new jewelry findings and for modifications to existing designs in our Suggestion Box. You also have the power to review each and every product we offer online. Just find the item online and click the link under the text “In Your Own Words.”
Original on top, modified design based on customer feedback below
The darker side of Nina Designs is slowly expanding with a growing collection of silver charms in edgier designs. With our current selection of silver charms modeled after snakes and skulls it’s easy to be tempted to explore the dark side of your jewelry style. I’ve been especially excited about our new silver bighorn sheep skull, with it’s elegantly macabre attitude that would mix perfectly with chunky chain or leather cord. The sterling silver beetle charm, with it’s precisely detailed legs, has been crawling around my imagination with labradorite, smoky quartz and even grey pearls for fierce earrings and necklaces.
Leah recently shared some sketches for new sterling silver charms that got a lot of excitement in the office, so I thought I’d share them with you. The skull & cross bone charm and beautiful animal skull charm shown below will make their appearance sometime in the next few months. While some new designs make their way to our office quickly, others have a longer, more tortured path full of revisions. These silver charms fit perfectly with my jewelry aesthetic, so I hope they arrive soon! Do you enjoy of the darker side of jewelry making? What do you think of the upcoming designs?
Sketches of upcoming silver charms
More sketches of upcoming silver charms
The darker side of Nina Designs
Bronze Pendants and jewelry charms are here at last! We have been working hard on this new, affordable line for many months and we are so excited that it has finally started to arrive. We currently have in stock our natural bronze, in a beautiful warm finish that is slightly deeper in color than brass, as well as silver plated bronze. In a few weeks, we will also have gold plated bronze in stock. We are using the same reliable 40 micro-inches of plating over the bronze that we currently use on our vermeil style gold plate over sterling silver.
Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin whose discovery heralded a new era in material culture, hence the “Bronze Age”. Bronze is significantly harder than copper which made it particularly well suited to weapons production but it was also used extensively to make jewelry. Dates for the Bronze Age varied by region. It had always been assumed that the Bronze Age began in Greece, Egypt and China, but recent controversial discoveries have placed bronze production in Thailand as early as 4,500BCE, over 1,000 years earlier than other regions! That places our Thai bronze pendants in a long tradition of bronze casting.
Indonesia also has an ancient tradition of bronze casting. In addition to jewelry and artifacts, bronze drums were produced throughout Southeast Asia around 300BCE. The largest known drum, The Moon of Pejeng, still sits in a village temple in Bali. I had a chance to see it about 20 years ago. It is a beautiful specimen of ancient metallurgy. As they do with almost everything, the Balinese have several entertaining myths about this drum. This one is my favorite:
“There were once thirteen and not twelve moons in the sky. One day, one of them fell to earth and got caught in the branches of a tree. Its light was so bright that thieves were forced to stop their nocturnal work and had to discuss how to extinguish the disturbing light. The most unscrupulous of them finally climbed up the tree and urinated on the moon until it burst and fell to the ground in the shape of gong.” (From The Art And Culture of Bali by Urs Ramseyer)
Moon of Pejeng
Bronze Pendants
Silver plated charms
Silver Pendants inspired by wildflowers is a theme that emerged during my recent design retreat with Leah. As the result of late snow, dozens of different wildflowers that usually bloom at different times were all out at once. During walks through the mountain forest, we picked some of our favorite blossoms to bring home, study and sketch. Once we started thinking about flowers, we looked through our favorite antique jewelry books for additional inspiration. By the end of the week we were dreaming about flower pendants and Leah’s hand was sore from sketching all day. In the end, we came away with a bouquet of 70 new designs we will be rolling out over the next six months. What is your inspiration this summer?
Rose Gold Charms are popping up everywhere on jewelry blogs and fashion magazines these days, and for good reason. The copper-gold mix of rose gold gives off a lovely blush hue that appeals to today’s woman who embraces color and ultra-feminine fashions. Some jewelry blogs have even dubbed rose gold “the most feminine gold,” and the “new must have!”
This trend seems to just be revving up, so now is a good time to incorporate rose gold into your jewelry line. Indeed, according to the LA Times, part of the appeal of rose gold is due to its exclusivity. Right now you just don’t see too much of it out there; it’s a bit harder to find, perhaps because there’s simply less of it being made. And, as we all know, the fashion world loves exclusivity, making rose gold super desirable.
For all these reasons, Nina Designs couldn’t be more thrilled to introduce our line of rose gold charms and jewelry findings. We’re starting with the basics and our most popular styles. After we see how this new line is received, we’ll build up our collection. What Nina Design style would you like to see in rose gold? We’re keeping a list of customer requests.
What I personally find very exciting is the look of mixed metals. I’ve always been a big fan of oxidized black silver with 24K gold vermeil, but now just the thought of incorporating rose gold into the mix sends me to the moon!
Silver, Gold Vermeil, Oxidized Silver and Rose Gold!
Rose Gold and 24K Gold Vermeil
Nina Designs just introduced an adorable new line of birthstone silver charms. I’ve always loved the idea of birthstones. My grandmother wore a ring with four gemstones – the birthstones of each of her children. She never took it off. And, like most little girls, my two sisters and I were excited to learn our birthstones. My sisters were very happy with theirs – emerald and ruby. While I was not as pleased with pearls, over the course of my life they have become one of my favorite stones and an important part of my jewelry line.
But depending on your sources, birthstones are defined differently. The one we’re most familiar with is the traditional definition based on the Gregorian calendar. Then there’s the modern birthstones created in 1912 by the Jewelers of America in an attempt to standardize the list. This is why we have options for what our birthstone may be. A little less familiar are the Mystical and Ayurvedic birthstones. Mystical birthstones are of Tibetan origin and date back over a thousand years. And, the Ayurvedic birthstone list is based on ancient Indian medicine and philosophy dating back to 1500 B.C. In fact, almost all ancient cultures, from Egyptian to Hebrew to Russian, have their own birthstone lists and their associations. There’s also a different list of birthstones based upon your sign rather than your month of birth, called your zodiac birthstones.
Learning your birthstone is a rite of passage for many young girls. Like learning your astrological sign, it can be a defining moment and, if taken with a grain of salt, a lot of fun. The important thing is passing on a tradition and making the birth of loved ones a meaningful and celebrated moment.
