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. 

Wedding Jewelry

The average couple spends around $5800 on the bride's wedding rings. Will she ever get even close to getting that kind of jewelry again?   Well of course she will because he will adore her till he dies, but first he will live to buy her expensive things.  Still, $5800 for her wedding rings is a good start.

After the trip to the jewelers for her rings, she is off to pick out the pieces she will wear on her wedding day and to buy silver jewelry for her bridesmaids as gifts.

The Silver Standard

In April 2011 the price of silver reached an all time high of  $49.76 a troy ounce.  It bounces along, far behind gold, on the world market at a rate of about 1:58

Say you want to melt down your 100 gram silver bracelet.  At todays price of $21.31 an ounce you would have about $75. worth of silver.  The same bracelet in gold would get you $4350....today one gram of gold costs 58 times what one gram of silver costs.

Silver, gold and platinum sell on the commodities market just like soybeans, crude oil and feeder cattle.  These are investments and while most investors don't take possession of their commodities, I do.  And you can, too.

Owning and wearing silver jewelry, and gold jewelry too if you can afford it,  may not be as financially efficient as buying bullion....although it might be....still, it is a fabulously stylish way to invest.

Precious metals...platinum, gold and silver... may be the last hedge against everything that goes bump in the markets and you may as well look gorgeous while being an exquisitely shrewd investor.