Christmas decorating and happy thanksgiving

We started to decorate for the holidays. My kitty loves to help. 

I hope you had a wonderful thanksgiving! 

I now have a new baby step niece it's very exciting! 

As a side note don't forget to check outs etsy shop for great stocking stuffer ideas like this. Nice and simple... 

See you again soon, 

Sarah 

Etsy sale coupon code for the holiday shopper!

I have recently started launching some new fall, winter, and nature themed jewelry for the cold months in my etsy shop. You can find my etsy at the link below if you haven't seen it yet. 

https://www.etsy.com/shop/SarahsSalvageShop

Find this butterfly necklace here:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/254141385/butterfly-and-berry-necklace-antique

I am also expanding my chunky charm bracelets in many themes that are perfect for stocking stuffers or secret Santa. 

Find this ocean charm bracelet here: 

https://www.etsy.com/listing/254144707/gold-ocean-charm-bracelet-antique-gold

If you want to keep up with my newest jewelry creations also be sure to follow me on Pinterest @ Sarahssalvage. 

Mixed metal honeybee earrings

 ( makes a great gift too!)

With the holidays fast approaching I want to extend a coupon code to customers out there who are looking for holiday gifts. 

Please use coupon code HOLIDAY2015 for 15% off an order of 25 dollars or more. What a great deal get all your lady friends a gift in one place! 

Don't forget to take a peek at my christmas jewelry too. Happy shopping. 

My harbor freight 40 drawer organizer review

I finally relieved my order from harbor freight! I purchased an organizer drawer unit for around 15 dollars with a coupon code. 

Here is a picture of my kitty helping me unpack it and playing in the box. Haha. Little cutie! 

Here is the picture of the unit with some of my goodies in it. I plan to label the drawers for easier searching. 

The frame of this unit is a pretty sturdy plastic, but not a sturdy as some more expensive units. The drawers are your typical frosted plastic. The drawers are just transparent enough so you can still see what is inside. The drawers pull completely out of the unit. This works great for me if I want to pull from multiple drawers or work from certain ones. This fact may not work for al crafters. This unit has 40 small drawers and one big one. It can be hung on the wall or it can be free standing on a table. 

It took a little bit for this unit to be shipping, but once it did it got to my fairly quickly through fedex. 

I would recommend this unit to my crafting friends who need to store small items that are not really heavy such as really heavy glass beads. It seems to work perfect for jump rings, clasps, charms, rhinestones, cabochons, and other embellishments I have. 

My Aqua patina drawer....

The large drawer with my large 30x40 cameos. 

Some vintage cabochons 

As you can see from the pictures the drawers make look small, but they hold a good bit of stuff. I noticed they have the option of adding dividers for further customization, but I couldn't find any on the harbor freight website and the unit didn't come with any. Maybe you could make some to for if desired? 

Want to find one of your own? 

Try this link : 

http://m.harborfreight.com/tool-storage/part-storage/40-bin-organizer-with-full-length-drawer-94375.html

I will try to keep you all updated with more of my organizing ventures. Thanks for reading! 

Sarah 

New storage in my craft room and a bead haul

Hey folks! It has been a little bit since I have posted here, but I am back. It has been a busy summer, let me tell you. Too busy. My poor boyfriend, who is an electrician if you don't know,  has been working 7 days a week 8-10 hours a day trying to finish a big college job in Burlington. We went on a short vacation to Maine, which was fun while it lasted. 

I wanted to share an overview of my dollar bead haul. I can't wait to make some beautiful jewelry for you and list it in my etsy shop at Sarahs salvage shop. Be sure to check it out btw if you haven't yet! 

If you bead, scrapbook, or make jewelry you have to check dollarbead.com out. They have great deals on some glass beads. Serious look at this beautiful loot. 

I bought some recent storage from tjmax, ikea, and harbor freight. I hope to show you it all soon. At tjmax I got some drawer dividers for a drawer unit I got at ikea. Gosh it takes ages for ikea to ship stuff btw. At harbor freight I got a mini drawer unit like the ones guys use for nuts and bolts. They have great storage there like I have said before. The shipping for them has also been terribly slow. Maybe I am impatient, but my dollar bead order shipped the same day and got to me in two days. Now that is good service! 

As for our monster house project... We have been working at a snail pace on the laundry room here are some scary photos of the transformations. We have a long way to go still... Oh lord. 

We are adding pvc chair rail to protect the walls. Send us well wishes that we get this finished soon. I want my laundry room sink back and my cabinets. Plus who really likes tracking Sheetrock deist over the whole house? 

On a better note the porch looks great and it's our retreat. Plus my kitty Cassie loves it. 

Well hopefully next week I can show you how the craft storage changes are progressing. Please check back soon! 

Sarah 

Busy day Ahead

Well we bought a truck! Let me just start off by saying it will be great to not have to rely on anyone to borrow a truck. When you do as much house work as we do buying wood and sheet rock it comes in handy. 

We have started working on our front porch. I am relieved because it's the first thing people see when they come over. It was stuffed with plaster and lath and old sidding all winter. Too long! Now it's cleaned off and we are mudding the walls. I can't wait to pull up the ugly carpet and put in our actual pretty light fixtures. Yay! No more embarrassing greetings at the door. I'll hopefully show pictures soon. 

Here is my jewelry work table this week. 

Cassie didn't let me get much done 

Listed a couple new things though in my etsy shop. 

Find it at Sarah's salvage shop on etsy! 

Oh by the way, happy Mother's Day! 

My new rotating storage craft room storage

I recently purchased this rotating storage from harbor freight online. I got one for me and one for my mom for Mother's Day. 

Unfortunately it is black and I wish it was white, but I am too lazy to spray paint it. I love this thing so far, but it certainly took ages to put together. The small price tag made up for it though. I paid about $12 with a coupon that my mom found. You would pay a ton more if you bought a similar piece from a craft store. So far o am keeping the things I use the most in it and some of my paint and colorizing items. 

I also thought I would share some small plastic containers that I found at the dollar tree. These containers hold my tiny flat back pearls. The covers hold really tight and remind me of old film canisters. 

All in all I am very please with my new work table set up. I think it is nice quality especially for the price. Please feel free to share your fun crafty storage solutions. 

Bedroom/ jewelry work room coming together

My boyfriend and I have a goal of finishing my work room/ guest room by the end of the month. Boy it has been a chore! Our house is very old and nothing is square. Not to mention the fact that Damon (my boyfriend) now has to work weekends to get an electrical job done on time. 

Today we cleaned the floor and started laying the laminate that we also used in the rest of the house. As you can see the shelves are in too. Last to do is some touch ups and trim work. We will have to figure out some kind of door situation as well. A standard door doesn't fit in this small house. 

A lot of time today was wasted fiddling with an acient air conditioner that was ready for fall out of the wall. Not a great option when it is still 5 degrees out. Anyways now that heavy sucker won't fall and kill anyone and the room is almost done! Woohoo!!

The wood paneling will stay for now. The air conditioner as well. Eventually we might replace the wall, and remove the air conditioner. Now though our first goal is to replace those original windows. No one likes to see to the outside like that. Haha 

Anyways I hope we continue to make progress and soon that room will be helping me create jewelry for you! 

Speaking of Jewelry this necklace is my pride and joy this week. 

Check it out and more at my etsy shop. 

https://www.etsy.com/shop/SarahsSalvageShop

Also please peek at my face book page 

https://www.facebook.com/SarahsSalvageShop

Like my page and private message me to get a coupon for 5% off your order! 

Have a nice night. 

Sarah Colburn 

My New jewelry line

Sorry I haven't been writing so often as I had. It has been quite busy here. We are trying to finish our upstairs bedroom by the end of the month and it is often slow going. We come across a lot of kinks to iron out along the way. More on that later when o can reveal more. For now I'll share the jewelry I've been working on. 

If you are new to my blog you may not know that I make my own jewelry designed and hand assembled by me. I love and am greatly inspired by vintage items and love the shabby cottage chic style. I love to colonize with paints and distress them to make them look old. 

I have started a new line in my etsy shop that includes some lovely distressed pastel maple leaf earrings that are perfect for spring and summer. 

Some examples can be seen above. I used hand made ceramic and claw flowers to adorn the hand painted American made brass charms. I even have some necklaces that are made from spoons that I bent to make pendants. 

I am particularly proud of my progress lately to develop a line and style unique to me. It has been a long road and it has taken me a few years to get this far. 

I have even tried branching out of my comfort zone and tried to make a shabby bat necklace with a slight gothic twist. 

I also made a large statement necklace that can be paired with my shabby style necklaces. It features a large brass bib focal that I hand painted beautiful pearlized pastel colors. 

Do you want to see my etsy store for your self? 

Visit this link 

https://www.etsy.com/shop/SarahsSalvageShop

All my jewelry is either made by me in Vermont or are vintage finds. 

Now as I end this blog post I will give you a quick peek at the bedroom progress...

Bedroom construction car wouldn't start

Well, this week my boyfriend couldn't get his car to start due to the cold. So we worked on the upstairs bedroom. Last weekend I picked out a soft blue grey pain and the shelves to recess in the walls. We cleaned up plaster debris and lath pieces. Here is the progress so far. We still need to add wiring. 

My kitty and I can't wait to have a real work room to make jewelry. 

Swelligant experimenting brass colorizing

I tried my hand this past week at colorizing brass with swelligant Patina. The results in my opinion were mixed. If you haven't heard of swelligant it causes a chemical reaction to occur in metals like brass and copper. As a result you will get rust or patina that would happen naturally but it is sped up chemically. 

I used these simple brass charms for my experiment. They are raw brass. I started out by washing and degreasing them with dawn dish soap and water.  I let them dry. My second step was to heat them up with my heat gun a little. I used my darice heat gun. 

After they were warm I poured the swelligant into a well and used a stiff brush and gloved hands to brush it on. 

Here are my results: 

My favorite patina was the darkening patina. You can leave the patina dark black or you can buff high lights in the patina to make it look more like brass ox. For this experiment I left it the black look. 

What I like about these Is that they are not very smelly. I would say they smell a lot like pickles. Haha. Could be worse. 

My second favorite patina was this one: 

The vertigris patina was a nice lime green with gold/orange hints. I found the back sides of the charms became heavily affected and were a brighter green. This patina took more time than the darkening,  but less than the Tiffany green patina. 

My least favorite affect was this one: 

The green rust patina just made my pieces very rusty looking. Almost all rust. This patina took the longest to affect the brass off them all. It really bloomed once I dipped the pieces in my plain water bath to stop the reaction. I have been told that this patina looks good when used on copper. I will have to try it some day. 

I experimented with some sealants and my favorite is ren wax. It is used in museums to protect items. I do not recommend using diamond glaze. Yes I tried it, the glaze caused a chemical reaction and it crystallized and flaked off the metal. I don't mind a spray clear coat, but because of the winter weather I don't have a good place to do that right now. 

Over all I enjoyed my experimenting and I will use these products again in my jewelry creating. If you make jewelry I hope you consider trying these as well. 

I will hopefully be selling these charms as earrings in my etsy shop soon so be sure to check them out if  you are interested! 

https://www.etsy.com/shop/SarahsSalvageShop

Have a wonderful rest of the weekend. 

-27 degrees!

Wow it sure is cold today. It's currently -8 degrees and it is 8 in the morning. The wind is roaring out there making it a wind chill of -27. Unfortunately or fortunately depending on how you look at it, I have two packages to ship at the post office. Haha, I hope my car starts! Whoa. 

I sold some pretty floral cameo earrings and a lovely repurposed necklace in my etsy shop. 

https://www.etsy.com/shop/SarahsSalvageShop

I'm really pleased thatit slows down a lot here at my day job this time of year with the cold. 

I am sorry to report to you that one of the puppies we delivered my c section passed away. She was the smallest and weakest. I wasn't going to tell you all but I thought I should be honest. We tried to revive the tiny thing but the owners had a hard time getting to us in the bad weather and it was too late. 

On a happier note... my crazy cat Cassie woke me up bright and early today. She always tells me when it is time to eat. This morning though I didn't feed her fast enough and in regular brat style she found something to tear up. Of course she only took two bits of food before hurling off to play with her kitty tennis balls. Oh my, a handful! 

Here she is at rest, which is currently 80% of the time. The other ten percent she is eating or pooping, and the rest she wreaks havock! Haha. 

Because of my busy week at work I was unable to fully finish something for bsue's finish up Friday. Ugh sorry! I did paint some humming bird charms I hope to craft into earrings, but they aren't finished yet. Hopefully something can be accomplished this weekend and I can share it with you. Talk to you soon. 

Excitement today

So I have a quick update for you all. That c section I was mentioning last night well we did it today. I had my day off today, but I got called in to help. Needless to say I was half asleep. Thankfully despite the wait the puppies were all viable. So far they are doing fine. We had a little difficulty with two of them. They didn't want to get going and breathing. We saw two girls and one boy. Mom took a while to take to them, but now she is nursing them well. 

Well back to my jewelry making day! Lol 

Work table Wednesday

Well it's Wednesday folks! That means I get a collection of components together for my jewelry making week.

This week I have a bunch of different themes rolling in my head. I have chickens, dogs, bugs, flowers, and more. I just don't have a clear direction yet. I'm just using my little odds and ends. I have one necklace with fish that is probably only 1/4 of the way completed, but I'm not ready to finish that quite yet. Yeah so much for getting done what you start right? 

Today was a busy and interesting day at work as a vet tech. We spayed a cat did our regular appointments and even saw a dog that potentially might need a c section tonight.  I will admit I wasn't too excited about staying any later to work than I was, even with the aspect of bringing cute puppies into the world. 

It's chilly here in Vermont tonight. They say it will be in the -10s tonight. I am just happy we didn't have as big of a storm as they predicted! I am so ready for winter to be over. That means we can do more work on the house and my boyfriend will be done with his first semester of electrician classes. 

That's all for tonight. Wish me luck on actually getting something done this week...as well as keeping the house clean.:-p

My first blog post

Hello, my name is Sarah Colburn and I am 24 years old. I am a veterinary technician by day and a jewelry maker by night. 

Let me also say right now those two things certainly aren't my only two passions! Currently I am also helping my boyfriend fix up our 1840s auction house. Wow what a chore! So as you might imagine things can get pretty hectic and busy in my life when I try to Balance everything in my life. Something I often say is,  "There isn't enough hours in the day!". Does any one else ever feel that way?

I want you to get an idea of who I am. 

I'm a short little lady who often gets mistaken for a kid, but trust me I have a lot of skills and things on my plate. Wether I'm helping the vet in surgery, taking X-rays, drawing blood, dry walling, tiling, or stringing beads. I am more than I seem. It was instilled in me from an early age to try to be skilled in many kinds of things. My dad taught me the manly things like small motor repair, how to buy and sell, cut wood, and plant your own food. When I lost him this past August I was really at a loss. He could no longer help me learn new skills or be there to answer some question about that noise my car was making. I was on my own. I now have this attitude stronger than ever though, that if something needs to be done try to figure out how to do it my self.

Currently I am working on an upstairs bedroom of our house. The house is old and has angled crooked ceilings. Our current task is to take take down any broken plaster, put up sheet rock and get a room for me to do my jewelry making in. It is looking pretty well, but it isn't a labor of love to be sure. It's exceptionally difficult to meet Sheetrock and plaster at a 45 degree angle.  I am part of a group on Facebook called the bsue boutiqes creative group. We show our work tables on Wednesday and finished projects Friday. People often comment on the fact that I build and glue over my living room floor/ area run but it's my only place. Believe it or not my jewelry used to be created on a crowded apartment livig room floor so trust me it's an improvement. Hopefully soon that bedroom will be finished.

So that creative group I was telling you about holds giveaways for people who participate. One of the newest challenges is a log one where participants must build a cordinatig line of jewelry with components that can be duplicated over and over. I decided this kind of challenge wasn't for me, but I did want to follow along a little. Part of the challenge was to make a blog. That's what I'm doing here. I'm also trying to decide on an easy line of jewelry that could be duplicated and sold as a coordinating line. Well that's where my love of animals is going to come in. I have already began to release dog and cat related jewelry in my etsy shop. I have added simple earrings, cameo necklaces, and cuff bracelets.

See my shop here

Animal jewelry


Anyway my goal with this blog is connect with others with the same interests as me and to go over my creative blunders and to show people my creative jewelry.