TribeBlog

We’re working like crazy over here at Onetribe HQ to get a ton of new products we are releasing finished and released for you guys. We are going to be doing Mayan Flared concave plugs and tunnels in most of our woods, starting with Bloodwood and Olivewood. All four (both woods in both a concave plug and a tunnel style) will drop next week, so keep an eye out for those.

We will continue to release them in new woods as we have the time. The style itself is a very traditional style of ear adornment not only in the form of clay and jadeite/greenstone pieces from Mesoamerica but also in some Southeast Asian silver pieces. Our pieces feature faces 6mm larger than the saddle with standard rear flares.

We’re also very happy to be in the process of working on a huge line of normal earring styles made from organic materials. These items and others are being designed and produced by Jared Karnes of Onetribe, Suzanne Phillips, a Richmond, VA fashion designer and other artists as a side project to eventually feature a full line of organic and sustainable earrings and couture fashion accessories under another company name.

Earring items with an obvious relevance to Onetribe (those body piercing related items made from wood, amber, stone, etc. in our own workshops) will be sold on the Organic Earrings section of our site. Two basic examples featured above are the Onetribe “Full Moon” earring in Tiger Ebony and Pink Ivory materials, with bio-compatible Niobium earring post and Titanium clutch.

Other items the venture will produce include earring styles made from a compressed recycled paper product, childrens books, screenprint and letterpress prints on wood and paper, earrings and other accessories made of reclaimed batik and other fabrics, organic knits and lace, as well as one-off rings, necklaces and couture jewelry items made from natural materials and precious metals. The project is currently nameless but when a name and website are finalized we will definitely be posting project updates.

I have a hard time keeping my mouth shut about things that are awesome, and these are awesome. We are debuting a few new elaborately carved hanging designs next week, which we will announce in a newsletter after they are up and ready to go. There are two 100% original Onetribe LLC designs we’ve been working on for ages and we’re finally ready to let them loose.

The Saraswati Swan, named as such because the Hindu goddess Saraswati rides upon a swan as a symbol of decisiveness and division in applying knowledge, which can be helpful or harmful to the world depending on how it is used, is an elaborately carved in the round (3D) swan hanging style. The neck is to be worn gracefully through the lobe while the body hangs elegantly below and the wings and feathers sweep upward. This style is available from 4g to 00g in Buffalo Horn, Olivewood and Pink Ivory wood at several different price points.

The Koi Fin is another three dimensional, directional design envoking the feeling of a quick splash via the curled Koi tail fin.  The design features a hook hanging portion which fades gracefully into a body of scales and downward into the curled tail portion. This style is available from 8g to 00g (Horn only for 8g and 6g) in Buffalo Horn, Bloodwood, Olivewood and Beeswing Narra for a variety of available colors and price points.

The last two designs, shown at the top center are our Saddlebags, simple hanging shapes available for the time being in Buffalo Horn and Olivewood from 8g to 00g. One is narrow and taller and the other is thicker and shorter. Gemstone inlays will be a future option in addition to a variety of other wood materials for a large range of color.

All of the designs featured in the photo will be available next week, the week of November 9th, most likely sometime between Monday and Wednesday. We will be sending out a newsletter announcing some site changes, these new products, and an upcoming holiday sale.

It’s oddly chilly today here in Richmond. Right now it’s in the 60’s, overcast with a cold breeze and lots of rain. We’ve got the bay door open and things are running smoothly with a very chill atmosphere here in the studio today.

We have been working on some precious metal casting as a new company project, in hopes of getting a line of nice reproduction silver going, and some unique weight styles for those of us that enjoy a little dangle in our lives. Our first project was to reproduce a set of antique Thai Hill Tribe earrings from our collection, as we’d had a lot of interest in them from visitors to the studio but didn’t want to give up our particularly nice original set. We created a wax from the originals and cast several sets, which we divided into two piles and finished them as antiqued and high polish. The difference can be seen in the below photo.

The top piece is one of the originals from our set. The bottom left is our reproduction in the antiqued finish (the original is tarnished, so it’s darker than our cast) and the bottom right is our high polish version, which is particularly sexy I think. They weigh 22 grams, are approximately 8-6g, and measure a bit over 1.5″ in overall diameter with an inner diameter of about an inch. They were handmade from start to finish here in Richmond, VA. Here’s an in ear photo of Rachel (our office manager) sporting them in 4g ears.

We’re very happy with them, they are much nicer than many other repros we’ve seen during our travels. We have a couple of sets in each finish (antiqued and high polish), and we’ll make more once we’ve sold those. If you are interested, please do let us know. Cost is in the neighborhood of $150 per set.

A good friend of mine and local customer of Onetribe stopped by the studio last night to hang out for a bit. I keep a few skateboards, and generally a BMX bike, here at the studio because I like to get out for a few minutes during the day and burn off some energy to help me relax. We decided to go out and shred for a bit and ended with me doing rad stuff over Larry in the middle of the parking lot. Here’s an action shot

Work hard, play hard

We have released a new style specifically for those with smaller lobes (8g to 1/2″) that are looking for a classy and simple plug. We’re now doing center gemstone set plugs with the following options:

• Virtually any material we currently utilize
• 1.5mm, 2.0mm or 2.5mm gemstone (depends on the size of the plug)
• We’re able to do larger front flares to accommodate the larger stones on smaller plugs
• Two settings to choose from: .925 Sterling Silver and 14K Yellow Gold
• Many common genuine gemstones including Ruby, Sapphire, Topaz, Amethyst, Citrine, Peridot, Rhodolite and diamonds.

We will start adding specific configurations of these options to the site as products, which will be made in house upon ordering, however, you may custom order any configuration you’d like by sending us an email.

The below photograph shows some examples: Ebony DF Plugs (00g) with CZ, Rhodolite and Smoky Quartz, Pink Ivory DF Plugs (00g) with Rhodolite, CZ and Smoky Quartz, and Tiger Ebony concaves (0g and 1/2″) with CZ’s.

I hope everyone who was celebrating “America’s Independence” had a safe and fun weekend. I also wanted to apologize if you were waiting for correspondence from us last week and it was late or non-existent. Our internet connectivity was down thanks to an “oops” by the phone company, and we were unable to access anything. We gave them a swift kick in the ass and things are well once more.

In the mean time we had our developer help us finish up the layout and formatting for our Enlightenment section of the site, and we added the first real content – the overview of our ADORN project and the beginning of our really, really extensive resources list. Almost every book listed we have available for reading here at the studio. The resources list will grow as we begin to contact more museums about their specific adornment related collections, and as we gather more books and articles for public viewing here at our studio.

We have some beautiful new pieces to showcase. The first is a small batch of jadeite tunnels of various colors and patterns. (You’ll find everything I’m talking about in the Unique & Rare section of our site). We’ve got some Guatemalan black jadeite made in a traditional four petal flower design, modeled after an actual set of Maya jewelry we own here at the studio. We’ve also got some black jade with pyrite flecks in it called Pyrita which is quite rare, and we’ve carved that into another traditional four petal flower design. There’s also the Chuconhueso material we’ve carved into flower tunnels. That set is 7/8″ but we have others. You can check out all of the jadeite by visiting the new jade material section we’ve added to the site. Here’s a photo of many of these items together, for jewelry-sex-appeal.

While we were at it, we decided to debut one of our new unique flower designs with a marvelous batch of beautiful amber from Chiapas, Mexico. There isn’t much carved amber available so we decided to fill a void in our hearts with these pieces. We’re all scrambling to find a way to make some new smaller holes (all of us have pretty big lobes) to be able to wear these goodies.

There’s a batch of virtually clear pieces that are free of inclusions as well as a fair amount of unique pieces available in various sizes that have inclusions and organic matter within. You can find those by visiting the Unique & Rare section of the site, or browsing the Amber material category.

You might notice in the unique section that we also added some other products – lavender jadeite plugs made of a beautiful light purple color Guatemalan jadeite, some pietersite plugs made from a Chinese stone that looks like someone took Tiger’s Eye and molded it like mixing different colors of Play-Doh, and some really nice ‘tortoise shell’ colored buffalo horn tunnels in various sizes that we’ve been collecting for a while. We’ve also restocked our Aztec Flowers and many of the regular products we stock on a daily basis.

As usual we’ve been doing a great deal of custom work when time permits, and we’ve finished a couple notable pieces recently. I think our favorites were the ‘mayan flared’ green amber pieces I made. Photos are below, enjoy!

Below, the photo seems out of focus but we were focusing on the edge to show color hue. Check out that green & green-blue!

Here’s what they looked like with bright sunlight shining directly through:

That Mexican amber is beautiful stuff, I love working with it. It makes me really happy to see pieces finished that still convey the same natural beauty that the material did in rough form.

I hope everyone has been having a great 2008! We’ve been hard at work designing and carving all sorts of nifty things to debut a bit later this year. Many new incredibly detailed and intricately carved designs are on the way. That’s all I’ll mention about the future because right now we have great stuff to talk about!

New Wood Spirals!

I just spent the past two days updating stock for a bunch of products on the site, namely most of our wood spirals. I’ve updated stock on the following products as well as extended the size range for a few of them.

• Bloodwood Spirals
• Pink Ivory Spirals
• Zebrawood Spirals
• Tiger Ebony Spirals
• Narra Burl Tight Spirals
• Narra Burl Drop Spirals
  

All of the new stuff is quite gorgeous, I always love updating this stuff. This week I’ll also be adding some larger detail photos for those products to help convey a little better the wood grain and patterning.

While we’re on the topic of spirals (and more specifically, hand carved exotic hardwood stuff), I’ve been asked quite a bit lately why some of the spirals, drop spirals, large sized wood rings and such can be a bit pricey. This is twofold – first, these designs take exponentially longer to make than plugs because they are completely made by hand from start to finish. It can take anywhere from an hour to half a day or more for us to complete a set of carved pieces.

The second reason is that some of these exotic hardwoods are very, very expensive and these carved pieces can be quite long or large in diameter (tight spirals and large wood rings for example). We price wood pieces partially by diameter, as rough wood is priced by diameter and many go up in price astronomically as the overall diameter increases. A set of 1/2″ tight spirals takes the same amount of wood as a set of 2″ plugs in that wood. A set of 1″ wood rings takes more wood than two pairs (that’s four plugs) of 2.5″ plugs. So there’s always this balance we have to strike between making sure we get paid for our time and/or don’t lose money on material and pricing things reasonably so that people can actually afford them.

So that’s that! Later this week we plan to start adding some very unique stone pieces in a new section on the site for individually listed products. We’ve got a bunch of 1.5″ and 2″ stone that is just gorgeous, there are a couple of photos below. We’ve also got various sorts of banded agates in the smaller sizes to go up, as well as some Obsidian that is proving to be impossible to photograph and all of the multi-colored Flint material we have from here in the USA will be added by color.

Did I mention that we have a batch of rare Chiapas green amber available? Pricing is yet to be determined (although admittedly it will be high end as the material is very expensive for us to obtain) and these plugs will likely be added as individual pairs like the stone. We’ve got from about 2g to 1″ in stock (yes, 1″ ‘green’ amber plugs) and the photo below should make some mouths water. We will be posting more information about why these are so special and what you can do if you want something custom from them a bit later. For now, enjoy!