The women of Silver Nina

     The jewelry we're creating is for all women who love beautiful things regardless of her specific style, but there are pieces that have a particularly powerful feel about them.  All our silver is crafted by dedicated and passionate people hunched over jewelry benches in Mexico pounding and polishing bits of that country's story into their life's work, but because these pieces are as unique as the artists and the country that created them, they are a gift offering to women equally unique.These are the pieces for women who favor their own gracious light over conformity, women who excel in games thought best played by a "heartier" gender, women who stand and dare, women who believe in and champion their own causes, and women who are the heroines of artfully lived lives. These are the pieces for women like my mother and my grandmother and like my brave and brilliant daughters.

And these pieces are for women like you.

Tracy in Newport Beach

Mission Statement:

We will tell women the story of Mexican silver jewelry, the exuberance and devotion felt by the perfectionists who made it and the elegant women who have bought, worn, cherished and handed it down to their daughters and granddaughters for a century.  Our mission is to bring the romance and mystery of this silver to every woman who loves fine jewelry and to make her a part of the story whatever her style
~Carolyn in Mexico

And we'll do it in a studio off the bougainvillea draped courtyard of a Mexican hacienda with all the windows and most of the doors thrown open so we can hear this* and the sound of water splashing into the fountain from every room.
Someone will be squeezing limes...
~Tracy in Newport Beach

*There's not much video, but you're too busy to watch anyway.  Just listen. And think "Mexico."

Details and the design.

Store credit resulting from what I swear will be my final attempt to find black mary janes with a moderate heel and a perfectly designed button detail was a good excuse to buy a pair of sunglasses that I would never otherwise buy.  I lose sunglasses too easily to cavalierly invest in the good ones. In fact, my last pair is sitting in a silver studio in Taxco, Mexico where Silver Nina's design team spent long hours with the talleres who are crafting pieces of metallic perfection to grace the digits, wrists and collar bones of the people we adorn.

The anticipation of these pieces softens the sting of the $20.00 loss considerably and the new glasses came with a lovely embossed thank you note as well as a business lesson.  Details matter. Details make the consumer feel good about spending their hard won shekels on your beautiful products and in the words of Charles Eames,

 "The details are not the details. They make the design."

Tracy in Newport Beach

Mildly Savage, Wildly Chic

This jewelry looks a bit paleolithic, don't you think?   A little savage?  It's from Talento via Fashion Rogue.  I see silver, copper, maybe some brass and bronze.  Total style and just raw enough. 

Copper and brass pieces are fun to buy and so affordable they're practically free.  Silver, on the other hand, is an investment; so give some thought to it because silver transitions beautifully from savage to formal and it lasts forever.  Which is convenient because you will love it just that long.

Hammered, oxidized and free-form metals, wear them as cuffs and bangles up one side and down the other. 

Dance around the firelight.

Carolyn in Mexico

Ordinary Love

 

I promised my mother one blog post a week because that's the only way I would actually blog. I’ll break a promise to myself in less time than it takes a two year old to meltdown in the checkout line at Whole Foods on a food holiday weekend when The Word "no" has been uttered, but I try really hard not to break the promises I make to my mother. Unfortunately I have no deep, meaningful or lovely thing to wax poetic about and that has created a lot of pressure in my brain.

Evidently this is something I have needed to create quite often in my life. By way of example, my first career choice: Oracle database administrator and linux sysadm. If you don’t know what that is, you may now have a seat with all the other sensible people. Point is, I made a rather major career decision because I once saw a movie with Harrison Ford in it where a small(time/town) girl gets the corner office and the Harrison Ford. As I’ve said, 17. Boy. Crazy. Sadly, I am not corner office material and I can promise you, those views do not come with the Harrison Ford. I’m more hacienda courtyard material. This bit of honest self examination puts me in the midst a work week afternoon where Henry Belafonte is singing Jump The Line while I design jewelry instead of completing the enrollment process for a computer class. I would detail so as to impress and enlighten you, but then we'd all have to leave the sensible table. And now that I’ve met my self imposed deadline and typed enough words to satisfy the visual space for a post, I can go back to the very ordinary love of pencil to paper and stone to silver. I told you there were a few things you needed to see. This video is one of them.

I also told you not to tell your friends.

Tracy in Newport Beach

Something About Mexico

I’m Tracy. David and Leslie, are my siblings and Carolyn is our mother.  She is the woman who, in her sixties, announced to my very patient father that they were leaving their life in Houston's "Texas chic" Museum district neighborhood in order to move to Mexico where she was going to sell silver so gorgeous that said museums had been moved to acquire the stuff.  The fact that my parents have gotten cooler as they've gotten older makes me re-think what seventy looks like.   Kind of like Mexico made me rethink what home looks like despite the fact that I now have a very comfortable life of my own in Newport Beach, California.  If you know anything about Southern California, you have a pretty good picture of the extent to which my comfortable life is truly comfortable and if you don’t, take my word for it. Life. Comfortable. But something changed three days ago. 

I returned home from my first trip to Mexico’s interior and I find that I’m pining deeply for what I’m honest enough to say is a less comfortable life.  I feel like I did when I fell in love for the first time with an exotic boy from Appalachia during a summer adventure with friends. (and for the record, because my mother will read this, I was 17, utterly clueless and I was boy crazy.)   My husband probably feels like my mother did at the end of that summer when I wasn't as happy to see her at the airport as she would have liked.   I'm only being mildly dramatic when I say I feel bereft.

See, there’s something that Mexico does to you that borders on the transformative, and I am very much inclined to keep its secrets to myself because I don’t want you to know them..  If you do, you’ll move to Mexico and tell all your friends, which will in all likelihood turn places like San Miguel de Allende and Dolores Hidalgo into gated communities, a thing for which I’d have a hard time forgiving you.

  The internist I saw for all the years I lived in Austin, Texas once told me that geography wasn't a factor of happiness.  Meanwhile, three days later, I left the sparse shade and triple digit temperatures of Texas for Newport Beach’s cool Pacific breezes.     Let me tell you, geography is a factor in happiness, and Mexico makes me happy, a truth that would have made me spray the mouthful of Mailly Grand Cru I just drank all over my laptop in fits of hilarity just a month ago.  I got over the summer of 17 boy.  I can already tell you I won’t ever get over Mexico. Mexico and its people woke up a very big sun in my bones.

 That’s what I’m going to tell you about.   Come with me.  I’ve got to show you a few things you really need to see. Just don't tell your friends.

Tracy in Newport Beach

Totally Turq

If you have untreated turquoise, you have something rare.  And you paid a fortune for it.  If it's untreated, it's totally turq, pure as the day it was born and and worth every dollar you dropped on it.  It is not dyed, stabilized, heat treated or powdered and reconstituted.  All these are entirely respectable things to do to turquoise, in my opinion.  Except maybe powdering and reconstituting.  That's going too far.

The word "natural" means different things to different people, but when a purist calls a piece of  turquoise "natural" he is saying that, other than cutting or polishing, absolutely nothing has been done to this turquoise.   Less literal folks might say, OK a few things have been done to it, but not much.

Paying a fortune doesn't guarantee you're getting pure turq, but if you pay too little it's almost certain you aren't.   So always get  written certification when you're buying the really good stuff. By that I mean turquoise that is truly natural and only 2% of all turquoise on the market is.