August is a great month!

Streaming sunshine, the last of the emerald green foliage, tons of fresh veggies… And it’s an especially great month for a birthday if you like peridot and your mother happens to be a jewelry designer- which luckily, is true for me!  As Jane’s daughter, I’ve enjoyed owning some beautiful pieces of jewelry, especially of the peridot variety.  We use peridot in many of our designs, and here are some great ideas for August birthday babies or women who simply love green.

Check out these links for a day into night take on peridot:

Three-stone peridot ring with diamond pave
Oval peridot drop earrings with a diamond pave frame

Speaking of bright summer colors, my mother’s vegetable garden is picking up even more steam!  This has been a real treat after moving from a city back to New England, to join my mother’s business.  The cherry tomato plants are massive, and the zucchini plant has plans to take over the world, or at least her garden.  It is so big and has so many leaves that we couldn’t even see any zucchini growing until we found one the size of a baseball bat! Our cucumber plant has also been showering us with vegetables, so after making falafel with my own version of tzatziki sauce, I knew we had the perfect solution to our excess of cukes.  I then made this recipe for my mom’s birthday and she loved it so much, she suggested I post it on the blog.  While I am not as good of a cook as my mother (yet, I hope!), I love spending time in the kitchen, and will have more recipes to share with you as I work on perfecting them!  Here’s the recipe for “Cleo’s Tzatziki Sauce.”

We hope all is well wherever you may be!
Cheers!
Cleo

It must be July!

Can June really be over? I can’t believe it myself!

July marks the beginning of long stretches of HOT summer days, when the only way to cool off after a day of weekend gardening is by eating ice pops! During the week, I love the way sunny summer days have a way of easing the stress and pressure of deadlines.  When the sun is beaming, things just seem to slow down but still get done.

While July promises to be an exciting month, I will be sad to see June go.  At the JCK show in Las Vegas we got to see many friends, as well as enjoy wonderful feedback to our newest designs!  Before too long we will post the designs on our soon to come, newly designed website…. We have also gotten so much wonderful feedback from the stores we sell to that are having success with this spring’s shipments of Twinkle~Twinkle.  Who could ask for more?!

Here in the Northeast, we had such an early spring that our flower garden exploded with so many varieties all at once. I hate to see them melt away as July’s heat takes over.  In one month we saw peonies, roses, irises, bleeding hearts, coral bells, foxglove, columbine, wisteria, penstamen, hollyhocks, and lily of the valley.  Now we have all kinds of day lilies and daisies, black eyed susans, astilbe, jasmine, lavender, clematis, morning glories, delphineum and ornamental grasses taking their place.  In the veggie garden we saw peas quickly come and go, but most everything else is beginning to hit its stride.  The garlic is close to 5 feet tall!  It’s probably a good thing the flowers will be chilling out because there are so many vegetables to keep watered, weeded, picked and pruned.  This year’s veggie garden is the biggest experiment in growing our own food we’ve attempted yet.

July’s recipe

Inspired by local blueberries (ours aren’t ready yet), this month’s recipe is an excellent blueberry Bundt cake.  If you grow your own blueberries or buy them at your local market it doesn’t matter, you’ll want more to keep making this delicious cake.  It’s the perfect cake to bring to a July 4th BBQ just add something red and white, like strawberries, raspberries and fresh whipped cream!

And so is Vegas Baby!

Is it that time already?? …come see us at our new location at the JCK show, Design Center, Booth 20137, June 4th-June 7th.
JCK is a trade show, it is not open to the public.
Give us a call to make an appointment or click here to make an appointment online.

Mother’s Day and Graduation Day celebrations are just around the corner

We have great gift suggestions for all the special people in your life. Let us know how we can help.

New jewelry designs, new website

So much is happening here at Jane Taylor Jewelry we can barely catch our breath! We’ve been feverishly working on new designs since the New Year started and if all continues to goes well, we will be showing them at JCK. We are using lots of beautiful new stones in new shapes and in mouth watering new colors! The Tucson gem show sparked so many new projects. We are just getting warmed up…

Once JCK is over we start developing our new website with Leslie our ever patient black belt web Master. She plans to launch our new website early in September. We feel so fortunate to have exciting new creative projects in the works we can’t wait to share them all with you!

May recipe

Jane’s veggie garden is off to a great start due to the unseasonably warm and early spring weather. Her plants are thriving. Before long we will all be snacking on 3 varieties of string beans. This month’s recipe could be one of the last non veggie recipes for a while as vegetables will likely dominate the kitchen here soon enough. By the way, thanks for all the great feedback about the pancake recipe! If you are a fan of pasta with white clam sauce this could be your Mother’s Day meal solution…mangia!

April….showers, April Fools, maple syrup, and Easter eggs…did someone say chocolate???

I know it’s bridal season and I should be writing about love and diamonds and all things princess-like; but I’m not.  Please don’t misunderstand, I LOVE diamonds, I am a BIG fan, and I would like to have lots of them, in all shapes, colors and sizes for my own lip smacking mesmerizing sparkly pleasure, because let’s face it people, nothing sparkles like hard carbon!  Especially the rare hard blue carbon!  Talk to me Harry Winston or maybe just send me a birthday present….?

But today we’re focusing on….

Rubellites

Back in February when we posted our first blog, I wrote about the Tucson gem show.  While there I found some lovely stones, specifically the most uniquely colored faceted tourmalines I have ever seen in my life.  Also found in the treasure trove that is Tucson, were some very cool unusually shaped cabochon rubellites.

Unmounted loose cabochon rubellites look like this:

Don’t let the name confuse you; rubellites ARE tourmalines, they are the red pink variety.

Cabochons are a little like jelly beans, they are stones without facets, whose tops have softened domes and whose bottoms are basically flat.

In terms of style, one type of cut is not better than another; it’s a matter of personal taste. I mix faceted stones and cabochons together as in my Twinkle Twinkle stack rings, they play well together.  I’m a gem lover not a fighter, no room for favorites.

As you might imagine, the design process is a long one.  Concepts can start naively in one happy design direction only to end up going in a complete other direction because of technical reasons having to do with geometry and engineering. It’s like building a custom designed house on a teeny tiny scale.

We recently managed to finish one rubellite cabochon ring and another is in the works.

I really love the way this ring came out.  Maybe it’s because it took so long to make from start to finish that now that it’s done it feels like we gave birth and all we want to do is stare at it like a newborn.  Photos never do jewelry pieces justice, not because the wonderful photographer who took this photo (Ralph, that’s you!) didn’t do a great job, you’ll have to trust me on this, this is one cool ring.  I’ll post up some more cabochon rubellite rings as we finish them…

Don’t forget to check out this months yummy recipe…and for April Fools, here’s a joke…since jewelry pranks aren’t remotely funny…

Optimist vs. Pessimist

A family had identical twin boys whose only resemblance to each other was the way they looked. Opposites in every way, one was an eternal optimist, the other a gloomy pessimist.

On the twins’ birthday their father loaded the pessimist son’s room with every imaginable toy and game. The optimist son’s room was filled with horse manure.

That night the father passed by the pessimist’s room and found him sitting amid his new gifts crying bitterly.  “Why are you crying?” the father asked.

“Because my friends will be jealous, I’ll have to read all these instructions before I can do anything with this stuff, I’ll constantly need batteries, and my toys will eventually get broken.” answered the pessimist twin.

Passing the optimist twin’s room, the father found him dancing for joy in the pile of manure. “What are you so happy about?” he asked.

To which his optimist son replied, “There’s got to be a pony in here somewhere!”

MARCH… four leaf clover anyone?

When I think of March, St. Patrick’s Day always comes to mind. I don’t have a lot to say on the subject other than last year I made my first boiled corned beef and cabbage. We ate too much of it and felt disgusting afterwards. On the contrary, I have been making Napa cabbage salads a lot lately and feel really great afterwards. Check out the Napa cabbage recipe. This salad is a great new addition to anyone’s salad repertoire.

By the time March starts I have a serious case of cabin fever, and I want spring to start so badly that I get my planting trays out and spread out my vegetable seed packs all over the kitchen table and start the whole planting project prematurely. By the time it’s warm enough in May to plant what I started in March, these cute little starters are leggy and useless and I have to go buy the healthy bushy versions at the garden store. Aside from gemstones, impatience is my only vice.

But since none of this has anything to do with jewelry, I thought I would let you know what the Pantone color picks for spring are and tie them in with plants and jewelry! Fun right?!?

Pantone

Pantone is to color what the Queen is to England. They are the leading authority; but everyone does their own thing. Pantone has determined that your life should include the following colors starting now:
• Turquoise
• Tomato puree
• Fusion coral
• Violet
• Tuscany
• Aurora
• Amparo blue
• Pink champagne
• Dried herb
• Eucalyptus

How can you go wrong with Tuscany, pink champagne and dried herb? Who comes up with these names?? So let’s find the tie in to jewels and plants, shall we? Some of these colors are perfect for plants & jewelry alike:
• tomato puree – red garnet – tomatoes, strawberries
• Aurora – lemon quartz – yellow squash – daffodils
• Amparo blue – London blue topaz – blueberries
• Dried herb and eucalyptus – green quartz

Welcome to our first Newsblog!

We’ve been as busy as bees changing the old monthly email to a new blogged format on our website. We will post our newsblog monthly and maybe more often when there is something really exciting to share with you. We hope you enjoy our blog in the playful spirit it is intended…

Getting familiar: we have designed the illustrations to link our readers to various places on our website, and eventually other sites. For example, if you click on the heart it will take you to a heart shaped necklace as a Valentine’s gift idea. The gift box will take you to another great gift idea. The fork-knife-spoon will feature a monthly recipe; which will eventually link you to Jane’s personal food blog that is in development. The birthstone illustration will always link you to our birthstone jewelry pick of the month, and the Q&A will link to interviews. There will be other illustrations in the upcoming months that represent subjects of interest, feel free to click on these links.

We welcome any constructive criticism or requests for featured information- we are always striving to provide our customers with the best!

TUCSON…Arizona

Upcoming on the horizon for the JT Team are the gem & mineral shows that take place in Tucson every year at this time. For those of you that haven’t been, the majority of the city is taken over by gem dealers, stone cutters, stone miners, and rock hounds from all over the WORLD exhibiting their glittering goods at hotels, motels, large tents and the convention center. The magnitude and vast array of nature’s bounty on display is stunning. No matter how many times I’ve been, I am always impressed and humbled by the people who dedicate their lives to the love of gems, their passion for gem cutting and the business of bringing all of it from mine to marketplace.

I can hardly wait to scout out new colors, and shapes, as well as new ways of cutting all of my old favorites. I always come home from Tucson with priceless inspiration and renewed design energy. It’s an immense experience all around; I look forward to sharing the creativity that comes of it with you in the months to follow.

Valentine’s Day… gotta love it!

I happen to be a sucker for ALL holidays, but this day of love is my absolute favorite.

Cooking, baking, and giving gifts are some of my favorite things, combine that with this holiday and in my mind, it’s the perfect storm. Valentine’s Day takes my favorite things to the next level because it also includes pink (favorite color) and hearts (favorite shape) and chocolate (yippee!!) and FLOWERS!!! I LOVE- love- love flowers.

Speaking of love, this is definitely the most love centric holiday of the year. How you choose to celebrate this day of love, be it a romantic dinner for two, a girl’s night out, or a day full of heart-shaped brownie making so your kids can show off at school, it’s all about appreciating the love in your life.

Which brings me to the gift concept, and who doesn’t appreciate a great Valentine’s Day gift? At Jane Taylor Jewelry, our favorite phone calls are the ones we get from people looking for information on items intended for gift giving….we love these! One of the best aspects of jewelry is that it is perfect for gift giving, not unlike chocolate and flowers and silly pink hearts. Be sure to check out our links for some Valentine gift ideas.

And since Valentine’s Day is chocolate without guilt day, right there we have cause for celebration. Check out my secret recipe (that’s no longer a secret!) for super chocolate brownies, you can cut these into heart shapes with a cookie cutter….fun!