Like it or not, the Holidays have arrived!
I’m excited to announce that Elephant Heart has just launched a new collection of jewelry for the holidays on our site, including a special SALE section featuring 10% OFF 10 of Elephant Heart’s most popular bracelets.
To show our holiday cheer and our appreciation for our customers, Elephant Heart is offering FREE SHIPPING on all items for the entire month of December.
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. In addition to being a day of gathering friends and family around a festive table, Thanksgiving is a day the entire country comes together in gratitude for how fortunate we are to be Americans.
There is a tradition in my family that I would like to uphold. Before we commence with our Thanksgiving feast, we go around the table and say aloud what each of us is thankful for. Some years we are distracted from this tradition by hunger and excitement, but I always take the time on Thanksgiving Day to think about what I have been most thankful for in the past year. Every year my thoughts first turn to my health and that of my family, but this year, after moving myself and Elephant Heart to a new studio, I feel most thankful for the roof over my head and the freedom afforded to me–by living in this country–to create my own business.
This holiday I also thought about the roof over the heads of another family. Several weeks ago I got together with a group of alums from my elementary school, The Center for Early Education, to do a Habitat for Humanity project.
We all met one Saturday morning–early–to put the finishing touches on a home being built for the Monroy family. The Monroys are a family of three children and a single mother who have always dreamed of having a home of their own. The two Monroy boys are autistic and require a lot of extra attention from their mother who is already stretched to provide for her family.
My job that Saturday was to clear and level the yard in preparation for landscaping. The Monroys are particularly exited to have a yard so the children may play safely outside.
As I sat around the Thanksgiving table with my own family, I thought about the Monroys, who for the first time would be sitting around their Thanksgiving table under the shelter of their own roof.
This past Friday I had the great pleasure of being a guest at the Oak Knoll Kinderhaus, a Montessori school in Pasadena, CA.
The Montessori method is a style of child-centered education where the students are encouraged to follow their own interests. Several children from the class had become interested in gemstones. They organized a field trip to the Natural History Museum, where they gathered information on various stones, made sketches, and practiced identifying rock samples they had collected.
When I arrived on Friday, the students were excited to share the discoveries they had made and to pick my brain about the stones that had interested them the most. I was more than impressed with their enthusiasm as well as their ability to retain new information and ideas. It was so exciting to work with students motivated by their own interests–I haven’t encountered that outside of a university.
I showed the students examples of the different gemstones I work with in my jewelry. We talked about ways to classify a stone and how to identify it based on qualities such as hardness and opacity. When we discussed the difference between transparency and translucency, the children were quick to tell me that one could use this information to determine the authenticity of a diamond. A true diamond is translucent; whereas as an impostor is transparent.
I had a wonderful visit and am looking forward to returning to work with the students again. The image below shows the children opening an amethyst geode for me. I think I learned as much from them as they did from me!
The way I present my jewelry to my customers is extremely important to me. The boxes I use speak directly to the care and craftsmanship I put into my jewelry.
For years I had used uniquely designed, elegant paper boxes. Some customers would even go to the trouble to return the boxes to me once they had removed their jewelry, rather than throw them in the garbage. I was grateful to these few customers for helping me conserve my resources and not adding more waste to the world, but I knew they were in the minority and that my boxes were still finding their way to the landfill.
With the switch from Elyse Jeanne to Elephant Heart, I decided to find a new way to present my jewelry. I wanted to find a box that fit the handmade elegance of the Elephant Heart aesthetic as well as one that could also be functional once the jewelry was taken out of it.
I decided on wooden craft boxes, branded with the same Elephant Heart logo found on this blog! I loved the simplicity of the craft box construction with its slide-lid top; I felt comfortable shipping the jewelry in a wooden box, knowing that no amount of transportation abuse would harm it; and most of all, I loved that the wooden box would be a useful keepsake for my customers.
The most exciting part of my search happened when Jamie, my incredible assistant, found the Nezinscot Guild out of Turner, Maine.
Not only does the Guild have a 30 year history of making finely crafted boxes, but the backbone of their business is a partnership with their community and the spirit of their workers. The Nezinscot Guild hires and trains members of the Turner community with developmental disabilities. Their hard work fosters self-confidence and enables these employees to earn wages that empower them as consumers and encourages them to be independent.
The Guild’s commitment to being a socially responsible business is an inspiration to me. I am thrilled to support their enterprise and proud to present Elephant Heart Jewelry in such fine boxes.
10% OFF ELEPHANT HEART JEWELRY #jewelrydiscount get the #couponcode @tillien www.anuttierlife.com #
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