The R&T Extra!   April 2008

A Shower of Spring News from R&T

We'll sprinkle you with the bad news first, followed by some brighter info. As many of you might have heard, the price of silver has been fluctuating dramatically again. In the first three months of 2008, the price of sterling rose from $15 USD per ounce (January 2) to $21 USD per ounce (March 17). On March 20, it dramatically and unexpectedly dropped to $17.50 USD per ounce. Nevertheless, anything R&T restocked before this unexpected drop is affected by the previous, higher price—our prices are inevitably affected by volatility in world markets. The copper market has also been volatile recently, and the decline of the US dollar means that some international products (like Swarovski® crystal, Czech glass beads, French barrette backs, etc.) could cost us more to restock. What this means for you is that some catalog and supplement print prices will change. For the most up-to-date prices on all our offerings, visit our online store. Visit kitco.com for updates and histories of the silver market and other precious-metal markets.

The good news starts with our first specialty catalog—a "charming" little volume. Find special accents for jewelry, zipper pulls, bookmarks, home décor and more in our 2008 Charms Catalog. This new 32-page booklet details offerings from lightweight wood to all types of base metal & sterling silver charms, plus charm connectors, charm holders and antique coins! You'll also find clearly-marked labels on lead-free items, information about do-it-yourself patinas and – as always in our catalogs – inspirational example-jewelry designs complete with parts lists. This exciting new volume will be available April 14. Call 1 (800) 235-8517 or use a catalog email form to request your copy ($2). Current customers can receive this volume free of charge—simply ask us to enclose it in your next order. This specialty catalog will only be handed out upon request, so be sure to ask for one!

More good news is that our 2008 Spring Supplement is on its way. You'll be whistling a happy tune as you flip through these pages. New features include Gemstone Harmonies™ and Fiber Optic Harmonies™—strands of color mixes that allow you to get more variety for less. New TierraCast™ findings include bead bars and bead cappers that allow you to easily transform large-hole (especially lampwork) beads into pendants. Plus, find Swarovski® crystal twisted-coin beads and pendants; Swarovski sew-on twists; more colors of R&T-exclusive leather cuff ends; new leather bracelet forms; fun new lampwork glass beads and more! Spring Supplement prices are effective April 9, and supplements are expected to start arriving in mailboxes around that same date.

Bizarre at the Bazaar: Strange New Industry Offerings

Our buyers have recently stumbled across some unusual new components in the jewelry-making world. Oddly enough, all three products mentioned below are being premiered on the wholesale market today, April 1st. We have no immediate plans to offer these new parts, but tell our editor what you think!

The first of these improbable offerings is literally out of this world. A company called The Jewelry Scientists (TJS) is premiering a new gemstone they're calling outasite. These "stones" are made from fragment remains of mid 20th Century, Cold War space satellites. As defunct satellites decay and break apart, small pieces are occasionally sucked back towards Earth by gravity. Most burn up in the atmosphere, but fragments are now being harvested by junk and treasure hunters, including TJS. Burn marks from re-entry on the surface of many of these baubles offer beautifully colored patinas atop mechanical and computer-like textures. Emilio Bunk, co-founder of TJS, first had the idea to use these bits of space junk in jewelry when he attended a Steam Punk party and saw dancers wearing small mechanical cogs as adornment. "That's so funky," he thought, and the gemstone's name was born (outas being ancient Greek for "funky"). Bunk has occasionally witnessed "unstable" pieces of outasite act in ways he says "cannot be explained by physicists." One bead (which Bunk claims he'll never sell) can change its hole size up to twice the size of the actual bead! Such anomalies are rare, though, Bunk assures wary buyers. He cuts stable, run-of-the-mill outasite into beads and pendants that are available today.

Moving now from cutting-edge 20th-century technology to cutting-edge 21st-century technology, a new component line from Japan is proving revolutionary in telecommunications. Cell-U-Lovely™ is a new line of components that allows you to embed an actual cell-phone into a piece of jewelry. No more fishing in an overstuffed purse when the phone rings! No more clumsy hand fumbling! The components come in a three-piece set that communicates via the airwaves: a focal pendant with touch pad on the back, a receiver bead and an ear-bud bead (which you attach to your main necklace via a decorative chain). Basic design instructions are provided, to help you place each piece for maximum comfort and ease of use. Currently, sets come in crystal bling, and Cell-U-Lovely says they will soon expand into additional looks (we think a fiber-optic set would fit their theme perfectly). Even this initially-available set is versatile enough that it can be combined with a wide variety of beads and findings for diverse design options. Whatever Cell-U-Lovely look you achieve, just remember to turn off your jewelry at movie theaters, in doctor's offices and at the symphony!

Some might call this next revolutionary product the perfect blend of ancient human endeavor with high-tech savvy—a new line of beads especially for hunters. Chunky unglazed ceramic shapes – perfect for male chokers, bracelets and key chains – are soaked in a concentration of ruminant animal hormones (deer, elk and moose varieties available). The beads are then baked a second time to burn in the magic ingredient. A perfect balance is reached in production, so that the finished beads have no distinguishable scent to the human nose. A deer, elk or moose, however, can smell these lures up to a mile away. Just be sure not to include too many beads in your designs (2-3 beads is generally considered sufficient). Hunters want these lures to work, but not so well that they end up having mishaps like those we've seen on TV!

Oh, and, before we forget to mention it, Happy April Fool's Day!

Recycled & Low-Impact Components

Turning now from April Fool's Day to Earth Day, there are strange and real jewelry-making materials available these days, and some are formed from recycled, reused and/or low-impact materials. For one thing, you can find fossilized dinosaur dung on the market! (True, this isn't a recycled material in the strictest sense, but we think it counts!) It's called copralite, based on the scientific term coprolite (Greek for "dung stone"), and in the rough it looks pretty much like what you'd expect (!). But, when cut and polished, the stone reveals colorful mineral patterns (similar to those found in petrified wood) and attains a true gem-like appearance. How can dung possibly become petrified (since, unlike bone, it quickly decomposes)? We couldn't find an answer to that, but we suspect the prehistoric conditions must have ensured that the dung was immediately sealed from air ... perhaps in tar pits or under volcanic ash.

Another real and bizarre recycled material is fordite. In the early years of automobile production, cars were painted by hand spraying. This meant a relatively large amount of overspray, which gradually built up on Ford's factory tracks, creating several layers of colorful enamel. These layers of overspray were continually hardened by repeated trips into "ovens" where newly painted cars were sent for their paint to dry. When this build-up of hard enamel got so thick that it became an obstruction to the line, it was removed. According to www.fordite.com, "some crafty workers with an eye for beauty realized that this unique byproduct was worth salvaging. It was super-cured, patterned like psychedelic agate, and could be cut and polished with relative ease!" Today, jewelry artists use this industrial waste as a beautiful and colorful gemstone. What a great way to reuse a material instead of adding it to landfills! Not only that, but fordite is becoming a collector's item. Today's car-painting methods are perfected to the point that there is almost no overspray in the factory. As a result, the fordite "mine" is tapped out, and existing "stones" are scarce.

Similarly created from reused waste, bowlerite™ is the brainchild of lapidary artist David Horste (Portland, OR), who cuts the "stone" into beads and pendants. Can you guess what reused material bowlerite is made of? On websites where he sells his wares, David advertises that it "almost always comes in large spherical masses," that the colorful (as opposed to all-black) specimens "show incredible swirls and chatoyancy" and that this "mineral," while available worldwide, is "most common in North America. It can be found in wooded country lanes (as well as urban and suburban wooded lanes)." David also works with traditional gemstones, but is always up for new lapidary experiments. In addition to bowlerite, he works with fordite, boat-paintite and more. He recently asked R&T co-owner Russ if he could have part of Russ's Coulee Dam drill core sample. Why? So he could make a couleeite pendant, of course!

These naturally durable materials make wonderful traditional components, but as candy manufacturers have long known, jewelry doesn't have to be as long-lasting as stone! Edible jewelry parts are another fun, Eco-friendly option—and they don't have to look like penny candies! On first hearing the term, you might not consider "unsustainable" jewelry to be a good thing, but good it is. The idea is to make jewelry from easily bio-degradable material. In 2007, Greetje Van Helmond, a graduate of London's Royal College of Art, did just that by creating beautiful lacey jewels out of sugar crystals. On treehugger.com (where you can see pictures of Van Helmond's bracelets and necklaces), Van Helmond explains that "[s]ugar has the quality of growing into crystals under special circumstances. By controlling the process I allow crystals to grow around strings to form accessories." (On a related note, R&T sales manager Sondra Barrington was recently commissioned to create a dress out of Marshmallow Peeps®—another fun take on unsustainable fashion.)

You might not have the scientific supplies or savvy to create intricate sugar-crystal jewelry in a beaker, but there are always fun and innovative ways to use and reuse available resources around you. This year Earth Day falls on Tuesday, April 22. Watch for local events in the surrounding days and weeks. And, have some Earth-Day fun making beads from recycled paper, worn-out clothes, pop-can tabs, bottle caps, plastic rings and more. Then, supplement your homemade Eco-friendly components with recycled-glass beads and (of course!) our wide selection of findings, chain, cable & cord.

Rings & Things is Still Going Green

When Earth Day approaches, we at R&T always like to brag a little about our year-round efforts to be Earth-friendly in an industry that can be pretty tough on the planet. Our 2007 Earth-Day article focuses on how we reduce, reuse and recycle inside the walls of our warehouse and along the streets of our community. Here are a few more measures we take, that haven't been mentioned in past articles:

• Not only do we reuse packing peanuts we receive in shipments (mentioned in 2007), but we supplement them with Eco-friendly peanuts made of cornstarch not Styrofoam. (Technically these cornstarch peanuts are edible, although we don't recommend the flavor!)
• Instead of constantly heating a large tank of water day and night, our warehouse is equipped with a tankless water heater that heats small amounts of water only as needed. This not only saves us money, but also conserves energy that would otherwise be wasted to keep unneeded water hot. (According to one estimate, U.S. consumers have wasted over six billion dollars since July 2006 keeping unused water reserves hot in homes and businesses.)
• Our catalogs and supplements are printed on paper that typically includes about 30% post-consumer recycled content. (We also use 100% recycled electrons to publish our newsletter!).
• We do our best to keep our web pages simple and fast to download. This not only makes them easier to use, but also minimizes computer power usage and reduces the carbon footprint for both us and you, our customers.
• In addition to conventionally made components, we sell cottage-industry parts, for example recycled-glass beads from Africa and Indonesia, resin beads from Indonesia and Karen Hill Tribe fine silver from Thailand. Dissemination of these cottage-industry components helps sustain traditional communities with low-impact lifestyles.
• Last fall, co-owner Russ and and some R&T employees joined the 2007 Spokane River Cleanup. In all, the Cleanup's 750 volunteers collected 12,000 pounds (6 tons) of garbage from along the Spokane River's banks. Better yet, the City of Spokane was able to recycle 2,500 pounds of it! See pictures of the River Cleanup here.
• Okay, we did mention last year that our employees maintain an exemplary record in a volunteer countywide commute-alternative program, designed to reduce carbon monoxide (CO) emissions in our region. In 2007, 70% of our employees walked, rode bicycles, took the bus or carpooled to work at least part of the time. As of March, 2008, that number was up to 84%. Way to go green R&T'ers!

How can you and your business participate in Earth-friendly practices? For information on Earth Day events and environmental news, visit the Earth Day Network. For general recycling information, see The Internet Consumer Recycling Guide.

Juggling Large Quantities: March's Trivia Question Answered

Last month we offered a teaser for the mathematically inclined: if 5 gross (720 beads) fills 1/4 cup, how many beads does it take to fill a gallon jug? Here's the answer we came up with (although our computer tech Brian was quick to offer an alternate formula, complete with radius measurements and pi!):

• 720 x 4 = 2,880 beads per cup
• 2,880 x 16 cups = 46,080 beads per gallon jug

April's Free Jewelry Project

April is National Autism Awareness Month, and we've created a design to promote the cause. A puzzle piece symbolizes the fight to find the "missing pieces" as to why autism exists and why it is becoming more prevalent all over the world. This easy-to-make choker can help you and your customers raise awareness for this cause with style.

To view this Designer Tip Sheet (a PDF file), you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader. You can download Adobe Acrobat for free here. Then, simply print the quick-loading or high resolution version of our "Missing Pieces" necklace design today.

If you're in Spokane during the month of April, stop by our wholesale showroom to see an Autism Awareness display. Wherever you are, remember to Spring To It for spring seasonal supplies, including components related to gardening, spring arts & crafts shows (including Earth Day), Mother's Day and school graduations.

R&T's String of Events: April 2008 Calendar

Between road shows, purchasing trips and more, there's typically a lot going on at Rings & Things! Here's what's happening this month:

• Saturday, April 5: BeadTour show in Bellevue, WA
• Sunday, April 6: BeadTour show in Tigard, OR
• Monday, April 7: BeadTour show in Eugene, OR
• Wednesday, April 9: BeadTour show in Sacramento, CA
• Thursday, April 10: BeadTour show in San Mateo, CA
• Saturday, April 12: BeadTour show in Costa Mesa, CA
• Sunday, April 13: BeadTour show in San Bernardino, CA
• Tuesday, April 15: BeadTour show in Phoenix, AZ
• Wednesday, April 16: BeadTour show in Tucson, AZ
• Sunday, April 20: BeadTour show in Missoula, MT
• Sunday, April 27: BeadTour show in Minneapolis, MN
• Tuesday, April 29: BeadTour show in Green Bay, WI
• Wednesday, April 30: BeadTour show in Milwaukee, WI

• Thursday, May 1: BeadTour show in Chicago, IL
• Saturday, May 3: BeadTour show in Grand Rapids, MI
• Sunday, May 4: BeadTour show in Detroit, MI
• Tuesday, May 6: BeadTour show in Louisville, KY
• Monday, May 26: Rings & Things will be closed so our employees can observe Memorial Day.
• Saturday, May 31: BeadTour show in Mount Vernon, WA

Thanks!

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