About men bracelets and serendipity.

Designing for men.

Designing girl's Valentine jewelry goes fluent, for men, it is different. You can't give your boyfriend or sweetheart a bracelet with red hearts, still  girls want to express their feelings, take initiative and give their friend a symbol of their love: I have to design a men friendly bracelet. Designing for men is difficult for me. I have some super nice bracelets in wrinkled leather but it is the leather that talks to me and says: use me for a man bracelet. Below is a picture one of this bracelets (more pictures here).

LoveLea's Men Bracelet in wrinkled leather.

How to design a bracelet and link this to Valentine in a "manly" way? I asked my husband, but the only thing I got out of him was: I don't wear bracelets; same answer came from my son. My son in law loves braided leather, but that is a step to far, out of my line. I was on my own!

I went through my stash of leather and my eye fell on cowhide scraps I bought recently. All very odd forms with a couple of long strips. One of this strips had nice details like curls and different colors. Perfect for a men's bracelet! Now the link to Valentine: red was out of the question. I can see a biker with a cowhide bracelet but not with red accessories;  leaves me the heart shape: I cut out by hand 3 hearts in different sizes in black leather, laced them up to a string of black leather, punched 2 holes in the bracelet, laced both ends through the holes, pasted the ends to the back and voila:

LoveLea's Men Bracelet in cowhide and black hearts.

No biker can refuse to wear this gift from his girl friend! Did you see the interesting curls on the left and the thwarted direction of the hair on the right? and the gradations in the color? Superb! And the black hearts are there, but very subtle. I'll make more of this style, (more pictures here).

This is also a bracelet for men, with a vintage evil eye bead, a "Love" plate, a coin and some tufts of silver fox fur. The leather is very nice: thin, flexible yet strong, just for an man's wrist. More pictures here.

LoveLea's Men Bracelet for Valentine.

Our first visitors!

last Sunday we had our first visitors. Remember the linen closet I couldn't get to the first floor because the stairs were to narrow? I took pictures of all the furniture that I couldn't place, emailed the pictures to my relatives and my niece Anna liked the linen closet. She is young, moved recently to a bigger house and has room for it. With her partner she came to get the closet and a small card table. I had invited them for tea of coffee afterwards. The living room was still a bit messy and their coming was a big incentive to get the house orderly. It took me about 2 hours to give everything a place, rather I should say to find a place for everything, but the house looked nice and cozy when they came. Even though it was very hard to let go of all my nice but big furniture, I have to admit that it is pleasant to live in a house that is not crowded or crammed.


Serendipity!

I want to close this post with an event that gave me goosebumps! I sent my sister Katrien a New Year's greetings card and she emailed me the card was in her mailbox and that she was very happy with my card. I didn't sent her a standard New Years greetings card but a print with very subtle colored flowers and some more things. She recently lost her husband and I wanted to write something special and meaningful to her. I put the card aside and it took me a while to get ready to write to her. I had chosen that card mainly because of the muted yet lively colors. When I looked at the print to find inspiration, I was struck by the number of symbols that were in the picture  (floxgloves, a butterfly and a bird) and wrote something nice concerning this symbols.

In her email she said that she sees  butterflies (there were 2 of them) as "signs" from her husband and that her husband used to give her cards with hummingbirds on it! I honestly had no idea that a butterfly and a hummingbird had this  meaning to her! And all this because I liked the colors of the card! Just telling you about this gives me goosebumps again!

And I almost discarded those cards: they were in the mailbox and in the accompanying letter it said: if you like me, buy me. I hate this kind of command: I am in your mailbox, now you have to pay! I just glanced at them, liked the colors and decided not to throw them away. Good for me and for my sister.

Now it is your turn to tell me about your serendipity; maybe this is not really serendipity but I don't know the right word for this kind of occurrence; if you know, please leave a message in the box below.

See you next week!