Saturday, March 21, 2009

The Real Price of Gold


This is a good reason to buy "Green Gold"!

Like many of his Inca ancestors, Juan Apaza is possessed by gold. Descending into an icy tunnel 17,000 feet up in the Peruvian Andes, the 44-year-old miner stuffs a wad of coca leaves into his mouth to brace himself for the inevitable hunger and fatigue. For 30 days each month Apaza toils, without pay, deep inside this mine dug down under a glacier above the world's highest town, La Rinconada. For 30 days he faces the dangers that have killed many of his fellow miners—explosives, toxic gases, tunnel collapses—to extract the gold that the world demands. Apaza does all this, without pay, so that he can make it to today, the 31st day, when he and his fellow miners are given a single shift, four hours or maybe a little more, to haul out and keep as much rock as their weary shoulders can bear. Under the ancient lottery system that still prevails in the high Andes, known as the cachorreo, this is what passes for a paycheck: a sack of rocks that may contain a small fortune in gold or, far more often, very little at all.

Apaza is still waiting for a stroke of luck. "Maybe today will be the big one," he says, flashing a smile that reveals a single gold tooth. To improve his odds, the miner has already made his "payment to the Earth": a bottle of pisco, the local liquor, placed near the mouth of the mine; a few coca leaves slipped under a rock; and, several months back, a rooster sacrificed by a shaman on the sacred mountaintop. Now, heading into the tunnel, he mumbles a prayer in his native Quechua language to the deity who rules the mountain and all the gold within.

Friday, March 20, 2009

Jewelry Could Be the Culprit of an Unexplained Skin Rash

Jewel Of The I does not use metals that contain nickel.


Unexplained skin irritations occur in millions of Americans, and for many, the culprit is an allergy to nickel.

Lisa Garner, M.D., a dermatologist on the medical staff, said that only real treatment is to avoid contact with items that contain nickel. The problem is that it can be found in so many metals. Fortunately, nickel test kits are now available for purchase online
that can detect the substance in anything from jewelry to belt buckles.

Usually, yellow gold won’t cause a problem, but be aware that white gold alloys contain nickel and other metals. Sterling silver is 92.5 percent pure silver (as often marked by the 925 stamp) and for the most part the remaining 7.5 percent comes from copper. Other metals that are considered safe for people with nickel allergies are: copper, platinum, and titanium. Be careful with costume jewelry, vintage jewelry, and some surgical or stainless steel.

Give unwanted jewelry a makeover



Determined to declutter? Mad about mining? Then the nonprofit Ethical Metalsmiths has a project for you: A Radical Jewelry Makeover, in which artists recycle donated jewelry into new designs--eliminating the pollution-heavy step of mining for new metals. The group has asked San Francisco Bay Area residents to "mine" their homes for unwanted gold, silver, and other jewelry and drop off or mail the pieces to collection sites before September 11. Students learning the art of designing jewelry with alternative materials will then handcraft new pieces for a fall gallery exhibit, where donors can use discount coupons to buy the madeover metals. Those who buy the jewelry will help support Ethical Metalsmiths' mining reform efforts.

If you're not in San Francisco, take heart: Ethical Metalsmiths has organized similar projects in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and Richmond, Virginia (you can check out the designs here), and your town could be next. In the meantime, consider connecting with local art schools, cooperatives, or metalsmiths that can update your outmoded jewelry or organizing your own swap fest with friends. Bead strands can be cut apart and given to kids or crafty types for reincarnation.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Bjorg Jewellery

Bjørg Jewellery… Fabulously Timeless !

bjorg2

Bjørg’s jewellery line is that kind of keepsake special jewelry that reflects nostalgia, tells a story or is just a beautiful token of affection, like the ”ab Imo Pectore” necklace tr. “from the bottom of my heart”( above) Aww….as I melt.

Also check out Bjorg Jewellery ’s cool promo movie here

Monday, March 16, 2009

8 Brilliant Scientific Screw-ups

I would love get any comments to this article... I will be commenting after each one. This is very interesting!

Anesthesia (1844)

Mistake Leading to Discovery: Recreational drug use
Lesson Learned: Too much of a good thing can sometimes be, well, a good thing

iStock_000005541300Large-Anesthesia.jpgNitrous oxide was discovered in 1772, but for decades the gas was considered no more than a party toy. People knew that inhaling a little of it would make you laugh (hence the name “laughing gas”), and that inhaling a little more of it would knock you unconscious. But for some reason, it hadn’t occurred to anyone that such a property might be useful in, say, surgical operations.

Finally, in 1844, a dentist in Hartford, Conn., named Horace Wells came upon the idea after witnessing a nitrous mishap at a party. High on the gas, a friend of Wells fell and suffered a deep gash in his leg, but he didn’t feel a thing. In fact, he didn’t know he’d been seriously injured until someone pointed out the blood pooling at his feet.

To test his theory, Wells arranged an experiment with himself as the guinea pig. He knocked himself out by inhaling a large does of nitrous oxide, and then had a dentist extract a rotten tooth from his mouth. When Wells came to, his tooth had been pulled painlessly.

To share his discovery with the scientific world, he arranged to perform a similar demonstration with a willing patient in the amphitheatre of the Massachusetts General Hospital. But things didn’t exactly go as planned. Not yet knowing enough about the time it took for the gas to kick in, Wells pulled out the man’s tooth a little prematurely, and the patient screamed in pain. Wells was disgraced and soon left the profession. Later, after being jailed while high on chloroform, he committed suicide. It wasn’t until 1864 that the American Dental Association formally recognized him for his discovery.

2. Iodine (1811)

Mistake Leading to Discovery: Industrial accident
Lesson Learned: Seaweed is worth its weight in salt

In the early 19th century, Bernard Courtois was the toast of Paris. He had a factory that produced saltpeter (potassium nitrate), which was a key ingredient in ammunition, and thus a hot commodity in Napoleon’s France. On top of that, Courtois had figured out how to fatten his profits and get his saltpeter potassium for next to nothing. He simply took it straight from the seaweed that washed up daily on the shores. All he had to do was collect it, burn it, and extract the potassium from the ashes.

One day, while his workers were cleaning the tanks used for extracting potassium, they accidentally used a stronger acid than usual. Before they could say “sacre bleu!,” mysterious clouds billowed from the tank. When the smoke cleared, Courtois noticed dark crystals on all the surfaces that had come into contact with the fumes. When he had them analyzed, they turned out to be a previously unknown element, which he named iodine, after the Greek word for “violet.” Iodine, plentiful in saltwater, is concentrated in seaweed. It was soon discovered that goiters, enlargements of the thyroid gland, were caused by a lack of iodine in the diet. So, in addition to its other uses, iodine is now routinely added to table salt.

**********************************
Nature~The Root Of All Goodness!

3. Penicillin (1928)

Mistake Leading to Discovery: Living like a pig
Lesson Learned: It helps to gripe to your friends about your job

Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming had a, shall we say, relaxed attitude toward a clean working environment. His desk was often littered with small glass dishes—a fact that is fairly alarming considering that they were filled with bacteria cultures scraped from boils, abscesses and infections. Fleming allowed the cultures to sit around for weeks, hoping something interesting would turn up, or perhaps that someone else would clear them away.

Finally one day, Fleming decided to clean the bacteria-filled dishes and dumped them into a tub of disinfectant. His discovery was about to be washed away when a friend happened to drop by the lab to chat with the scientist. During their discussion, Fleming griped good-naturedly about all the work he had to do and dramatized the point by grabbing the top dish in the tub, which was (fortunately) still above the surface of the water and cleaning agent. As he did, Fleming suddenly noticed a dab of fungus on one side of the dish, which had killed the bacteria nearby. The fungus turned out to be a rare strain of penicillium that had drifted onto the dish from an open window.

Fleming began testing the fungus and found that it killed deadly bacteria, yet was harmless to human tissue. However, Fleming was unable to produce it in any significant quantity and didn’t believe it would be effective in treating disease. Consequently, he downplayed its potential in a paper he presented to the scientific community. Penicillin might have ended there as little more than a medical footnote, but luckily, a decade later, another team of scientists followed up on Fleming’s lead. Using more sophisticated techniques, they were able to successfully produce one of the most life-saving drugs in modern medicine.

********************************************

It is ashame that antibiotics are over used and sometimes do more harm than good.

Not saying that they can't be helpful at times for healing.

4. The Telephone (1876)

Mistake Leading to Discovery: Poor foreign language skills
Lesson Learned: A little German is better than none

telephone.jpgIn the 1870s, engineers were working to find a way to send multiple messages over one telegraph wire at the same time. Intrigued by the challenge, Alexander Graham Bell began experimenting with possible solutions. After reading a book by Hermann Von Helmholtz, Bell got the idea to send sounds simultaneously over a wire instead. But as it turns out, Bell’s German was a little rusty, and the author had mentioned nothing about the transmission of sound via wire. Too late for Bell though; the inspiration was there, and he had already set out to do it.

The task proved much more difficult than Bell had imagined. He and his mechanic, Thomas Watson, struggled to build a device that could transmit sound. They finally succeeded, however, and came up with the telephone.

5. Photography (1835)

Mistake Leading to Discovery: Not doing the dishes
Lesson Learned: Put off today what you can do tomorrow

Between 1829 and 1835, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre was close to becoming the first person to develop a practical process for producing photographs. But he wasn’t home yet.

Daguerre had figured out how to expose an image onto highly polished plates covered with silver iodide, a substance known to be sensitive to light. However, the images he was producing on these polished plates were barely visible, and he didn’t know how to make them darker.

After producing yet another disappointing image one day, Daguerre tossed the silverized plate in his chemical cabinet, intending to clean it off later. But when he went back a few days later, the image had darkened to the point where it was perfectly visible. Daguerre realized that one of the chemicals in the cabinet had somehow reacted with the silver iodide, but he had no way of know which one it was … and there were a whole lot of chemicals in that cabinet.

For weeks, Daguerre took one chemical out of the cabinet every day and put it in a newly exposed plate. But every day, he found a less-than-satisfactory image. Finally, as he was testing the very last chemical, he got the idea to put the plate in the now-empty cabinet, as he had done the first time. Sure enough, the image on the plate darkened. Daguerre carefully examined the shelves of the cabinet and found what he was looking for. Weeks earlier, a thermometer in the cabinet had broken, and Daguerre (being the slob that he was) didn’t clean up the mess very well, leaving a few drops of mercury on the shelf. Turns out, it was the mercury vapor interacting with the silver iodide that produced the darker image. Daguerre incorporated mercury vapor into his process, and the Daguerreotype photograph was born.

**********************************

Wow that is news to me... Mercury.

Very toxic stuff.

I love the digital camera!

6. Mauve Dye (1856)

Mistake Leading to Discovery: Delusions of grandeur
Lesson Learned: Real men wear mauve

In 1856, an 18-year-old British chemistry student named William Perkin attempted to develop a synthetic version of quinine, the drug commonly used to treat malaria

. It was a noble cause, but the problem was, he had no idea what he was doing.

Perkin started by mixing aniline (a colorless, oily liquid derived from coal-tar, a waste product of the steel industry) with propylene gas and potassium dichromate. It’s a wonder he didn’t blow himself to bits, but the result was just a disappointing black mass stuck to the bottom of his flask. As Perkin started to wash out the container, he noticed that the black substance turned the water purple, and after playing with it some more, he discovered that the purple liquid could be used to dye cloth.

With financial backing from his wealthy father, Perkin began a dye-making business, and his synthetic mauve colorant soon became popular. Up until the time of Perkin’s discovery, natural purple dye had to be extracted from Mediterranean mollusks, making it extremely expensive. Perkin’s cheap coloring not only jumpstarted the synthetic dye industry (and gave birth to the colors used in J.Crew catalogs), it also sparked the growth of the entire field of organic chemistry.

******************************************

hhhhmmmmm... now I know why I prefer natural dyes opposed to chemical.

Of coarse the ones that are not from an mollusks.

7. Nylon (1934)

Mistake Leading to Discovery: Workplace procrastination
Lesson Learned: When the cat’s away, the mice should play

In 1934, researchers at DuPont were charged with developing synthetic silk. But after months of hard work, they still hadn’t found what they were looking for, and the head of the project, Wallace Hume Carothers, was considering calling it quits. The closest they had come was creating a liquid polymer that seemed chemically similar to silk, but in its liquid form wasn’t very useful. Deterred, the researchers began testing other, seemingly more promising substances called polyesters.

One day, a young (and apparently bored) scientist in the group noticed that if he gathered a small glob of polyester on a glass stirring rod, he could use it to pull thin strands of the material from the beaker. And for some reason (prolonged exposure to polyester fumes, perhaps?) he found this hilarious. So on a day when boss-man Carothers was out of the lab, the young researcher and his co-workers started horsing around and decided to have a competition to see who could draw the longest threads from the beaker. As they raced down the hallway with the stirring rods, it dawned on them: By stretching the substance into strands, they were actually re-orienting the molecules and making the liquid material solid.

Ultimately, they determined that the polyesters they were playing with couldn’t be used in textiles, like DuPont wanted, so they turned to their previously unsuccessful silk-like polymer. Unlike the polyester, it could be drawn into solid strands that were strong enough to be woven. This was the first completely synthetic fiber, and they named the material Nylon.

************************************************

Leave it up to DuPont to make "the first completely synthetic fiber"!!!!!!!

Organic cotton, soy fabric, and hemp are my favorite materials.... Made with out chemicals.

You don't have to pollute the earth to wear clothes.

8. Vulcanized Rubber (1844)

Mistake Leading to Discovery: Obsession combined with butterfingers
Lesson Learned: A little clumsiness can go a long way

In the early 19th century, natural rubber was relatively useless. It melted in hot weather and became brittle in the cold. Plenty of people had tried to “cure” rubber so it would be impervious to temperature changes, but no one had succeeded … that is, until Charles Goodyear stepped in (or so he claims). According to his own version of the tale, the struggling businessman became obsessed with solving the riddle of rubber, and began mixing rubber with sulfur over a stove. One day, he accidentally spilled some of the mixture onto the hot surface, and when it charred like a piece of leather instead of melting, he knew he was onto something.

The truth, according to well-documented sources, is somewhat different. Apparently, Goodyear learned the secret of combining rubber and sulfur from another early experimenter. And it was one of his partners who accidentally dropped a piece of fabric impregnated with the rubber and sulfur mixture onto a hot stove. But it was Goodyear who recognized the significance of what happened, and he spent months trying to find the perfect combination of rubber, sulfur and high heat. (Goodyear also took credit for coining the term “vulcanization” for the process, but the word was actually first used by an English competitor.) Goodyear received a patent for the process in 1844, but spent the rest of his life defending his right to the discovery. Consequently, he never grew rich and, in fact, wound up in debtors prison more than once. Ironically, rubber became a hugely profitable industry years later, with the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. at the forefront.

***********************************************

Dang, Goodyear stole that!

Corrupt.

This article originally appeared in mental_floss magazine.

Elfman

Hard work and dedication have their time and place, but the values of failure and ineptitude have gone unappreciated for far too long. They say that patience is a virtue, but the following eight inventions prove that laziness, slovenliness, clumsiness and pure stupidity can be virtues, too.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

The blind knows beauty when it feels it


One of the most sweetest and amazing things that has happened to me in all of my vending days....... This past Holiday Market in Eugene, OR I was vending one weekend and a blind lady came buy feeling up all of the jewelry. I was flattered. Well two weekends later the same women came to my both with her husband. She was feeling all over the place again for something special this time I guess? I approached her and asked if she needed some help and she said "yes" that she was looking for a particular piece that she really loved. So we searched... I had moved things around the weekend before to change the flow.. oops. After searching a bit we found what she was looking for. And she told her husband that was what she wanted for a gift from him for Christmas. What an experience... one that I will always remember.
The jewelry I make usually has texture and weight to it... did it feel nice to touch? Or maybe it was the energy of the stones that she felt? Whatever it was it truly touched me and I felt honored. She couldn't see the vibrant colors that others would see or the unique clasps that I use.. it was something else.. the feeling... or the way that it made her feel when she touched the necklace.

Friday, March 6, 2009

Art Basel, Miami Florida ~ The Visionary Art Of Alex Grey




What a sweet event to be part of. Art Basel Miami Beach takes place December 3 - 6, 2009. Art Basel Miami Beach is the most important art show in the United States, a cultural and social highlight for the Americas. As the sister event of Switzerland's Art Basel, the most prestigious art show worldwide for the past 39 years, Art Basel Miami Beach combines an international selection of top galleries with an exciting program of special exhibitions, parties and crossover events featuring music, film, architecture and design.
Jewel of the the I had the opportunity be part of "The Visionary Art Of Alex Grey" the gallery showing of Alex Grey. Put on by the Moksha Family. It was an amazing event to be part of. Live painting, lectures by Alex Grey , great music at night and so much more. You gotta love a business trip to where the sun is shinning in the winter time. I made lots of good connections and links and oh yeah my sales were rockin'!

A summer of travel and lots of vending

This summer was fun filled.... I was fortunate to vend at all the of my favorite festivals this summer. Whole Earth Festival~ Davis CA, Harmony Festival~ Santa Rosa CA, Summer Arts and Music Festival ~ Benbow CA, Earthdance ~ Laytonville CA, and more more more!!! I had lots of fun while networking and bringing in the sales. I love being able to be a part of these kind of events because I get to have a good time while working hard.