Honey & Ollie Designs

Our new Earring Club format is getting raves! People love the new Fairy Tale and Travel themes and I’ve gotten such great feedback about the teas that augment each jewelry shipment. On a personal level, I’m really enjoying the enhanced creative scope, and it’s been pretty fun to pick out some fun new teas to share with you all each month. Not to mention, I get to try them too!

Signups for the Winter 2015 Earring Clubs are up in the Etsy shop – between now and January 15th. We’ve got two club options this time around, and there are only six spots in each club so you’ll want to sign up early and not miss out! Fairy Tales and Travel.

Each month you will receive a gorgeous pair of earrings inspired by a beloved fairy tale or an exotic place that you might like to travel to. You’ll also be getting a wonderful assortment of tea samples from some of my favorite tea merchants. Tea samples are generally enough for 2 – 4 cups, depending on the tea.
Each club is a steal, at just $99 for the entire 3-month club round, plus shipping. It works out to roughly $37 per pair of earrings, including the shipping charges. Most of our club earrings go on to retail for 2-3x that amount in our online shop and at shows. Club designs range from delicate precious metals adorned with elegant gemstones to chunky bohemian creations with art beads and hammered copper. You never know exactly what you’re going to get, but you can always count on something wonderful.

For November’s Fairy Tale club, we explored the story of Snow White, or the Snowskin.

I’ve always been really fascinated by the Evil Stepmother. Why was she so evil? What happened to make her such an awful person? Was she always that way?

Fairy tales are often grim and the Snowskin’s sad tale is no exception. In order to get her happy ending, the poor girl has to suffer through an abusive childhood, waiting on seven slovenly (but kind!) little dwarves in an isolated cottage, several murder attempts that finally culminate in death by poison apple, and adding insult to injury, she’s kissed by an obsessive Prince who likes dead girls in coffins. But as with all good tales, in the end, good triumphs, true love wins, and Evil gets her comeuppance. In some versions, the Evil Stepmother is forced to dance in red-hot shoes at the wedding of Snow and Charming. In other versions, she is torn apart by horses. The Disney version is actually pretty mellow. Evil just falls off a cliff and she’s never seen again. We are left to assume she is dead, but then again she just as easily could be on a Mickey cruise, doing the limbo on the Lido deck.

I decided to design this month’s earring along the grim notes of the story. I chose the black druzy to be representative of the Evil Stepmother’s hard and blackened heart. The sterling bowl it sits in is, of course, a substitute for the box that Evil gives the Huntsman. “Bring me back her heart. Leave the rest.” Evil says. “Because, Evil reasons.” And you can’t really have a box (or a bowl) of heart without a little bleeding, can you? The result is a stunning ruby and druzy chandelier earring with some swing and drama, something that will work well at all the Evil winter parties!

The Fairy Tale Tea this month was in keeping with our theme, we sent sachets of a caramel apple tea from Adagio. A fine loose-leaf black tea blended with apple, cinnamon, and caramel flavors and I promise, all stepmothers and others involved with the making of this tea were of the Good variety!

Our Teahouse club went to Iceland, the land of Fire and Ice.

Iceland is such a remarkable place with crazy contrasts of color and landscape, texture and extremes. I wasn’t sure which aspects to narrow it down to when designing the club earrings this month. I did the whole set up one way but I really wasn’t happy with them. After I did the Snow White design, I really loved how the crossbar and chain really set off the druzy, so I went back and totally redid the Teahouse set. For ice, I used a natural white quartz druzy as the focal stone. Each druzy is set off with Ethiopian opals above (Northern Lights), and luminous sunstone below (fiery volcanoes) – Iceland is the land of Fire and Ice, after all! I loved the contrast of the mixed metals – each druzy is wrapped in warm bronze and hung on cool sterling silver. These are warm and cool all at the same time, with all the swing and sparkle you could want in a holiday earring.

The tea sent out to our Teahouse club was a delicious white camellia sinensis tea called “Snowbud” from the Fujian region of China. It came via of my favorite tea merchants – Adagio Teas.

If you’re curious about what we did in October, well you can read about it here. December is the final month in the Autumn round and I’ve got some special treats lined up!

Our Winter 2015 Earring Clubs are going to be a lot of fun. The clubs run through January, February, and March. We will be exploring several of my favorite places and folk stories!

January: Little Red Riding Hood or Tudor England.
February: Beauty & The Beast or The Black Forest
March: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz or Ireland.

I so hope you will join us! Signups for the Teahouse and Fairy Tale clubs are open now in our Etsy store! Space is limited!

Actually it’s the day after the day after the day that went sideways and things Chez Nuthouse have calmed down a lot. My blood pressure is pretty much back to normal and I no longer feel like my head and chest are going to explode. Lemon berry pancakes were finally acquired, the car made it home and the cats were super happy to see me come in the door. Ok, they were probably just super happy that the woodstove got lit, but I cherish my illusions.

The last Faire of the season is done and it finally feels like there’s a quiet space to sit down and relax. Except not really, because the biggest show of my year is in very 2 short weeks! I have to resist the allure of the cozy woodstove and the recliner that sits right in front of it (The Vortex of Nap), get into my (chilly) studio and start cranking.

I was in Costco yesterday, grabbing a prescription, and it is like Christmas threw up all over the store. Guys, can we slow down? You’ve had that stuff up since before Halloween. What about Thanksgiving? How can we skip over pie like this? Won’t someone think of the children pie?

This little Sonora holiday festival we are doing on Thanksgiving weekend is so wonderful, so magical, and such a treat to participate in, but the one downer is that we have to set up on Thanksgiving Day! Mom and I have to figure out how to do our turkey dinner and a show setup. Since I am local to the show, we have that luxury – we are applying creative stratagems as “do the bulk of the cooking on Wednesday” and “order the pies from the Sugar Shack” and “no nasty green bean casserole.”

It’ll be fine. It is just a shift and I really had to think about it before I applied to the show. I guess that’s what we all have to do as shoppers, business owners, artists, whatever. Find our balance with the season.

The truth is, I really don’t know how to handle the holidays gracefully. As a consumer, I just want a little peace and quiet. As a retailer, I’m being bombarded with helpful advice from “experts” and most of that advice boils down to “email lots” and “bombard them with your awesome” and “it’s all about the money.” I am left with a over-whelming sense of, “No….” in the face of that. Does my awesome have to bombard? Is shock and awe really a viable marketing strategy? How about an expression of core values in the way we choose to comport ourselves this season?

The pressure is tremendous on everyone this time of year. I have to work hard not to buy in to it. What if I miss out? What if people forget about me? What if sales tank and I can’t pay my rent? This happens every year. The experts say, “You are doing it wrong.” but when I am quiet and listen, and can disengage from the suggestion to feel fear over losing sales, I feel like I am doing it right.

Since I am going to disappear into the studio for 2 weeks, I thought I’d get this out of the way now. Here is what’s going to happen in the land of Honey&Ollie this holiday season (hint: it’s pretty much the same thing that happens every season).

1. A fantastic, fabulous, and exciting Etsy coupon code is going out to the mailing list sometime in the next week. That coupon is good from when it goes out to the list until the end of the year. Pre holiday, post holiday, you can use it any time you want, as many times as you want, up until New Year’s Day. You can sign up for the list over to the right there on the right, see? There’s a widget.
2. I am offering free shipping on Etsy orders on Thanksgiving weekend. The coupon code will go live on the blog on Black Friday morning. You can’t double up coupons, alas.

After the coupons go out, you won’t get any more holiday-specific emails or blather from H&O. Shop updates will be on the blog. The Earring Club signup notices do go out to the mailing list in December and I’ll be posting about them here as well. And, I will probably want to wish y’all a happy holiday at some point!

And that’s it.

Important shipping and ordering info!
1. The deadline for shipping in the Continental US is December 15th. I am not shipping after that date! Both the website and the Etsy shop will be on vacation from Dec. 16th until Dec. 26th. Both shops will re-open for orders on Dec. 26th, but we will not be shipping any product until January 5th. I need a vacation!
2. We stop taking custom and double wax seal orders on Dec. 10th, so I can meet the deadline and get you your goodies in time.
3. Gift-wrapping is always free. Just ask for it when you check out – in the convo section of your order form.
4. We ship anywhere in the US for you, if you give me the address where it is going. I’ll even write out a nice tag with whatever you want it to say!
5. You can upgrade to Priority shipping more easily this year, we’ll have an Etsy listing that you can add to your order for the extra postage.

I am not just grateful for my wonderful customers during the holidays. I am grateful to you all year round. I do not want to be like the big box stores and add to your holiday stress. Whether or not you choose to shop with H&O this season or not, please know that you are oh so appreciated by me.

And those turkeys, red maple leaves and pumpkins are staying up in my windows until December, oh yes they are! Twinkle lights are pan-seasonal, but turkeys need love too!

xo