Vampire Night

This really just started out as a brainstorm one night while I was making jewelry. I'd been watching a lot of "True Blood" (my husband and I are both hooked), and then I just started thinking of vampires in general, and I decided, hey, I should make some "vampire-themed" jewelry. At first, I was just going to make pieces modeled after those worn by characters on TV and in movies. But my web-searching wasn't turning up a whole helluva lot to go by.

So it morphed from there, into just generic vampy-jewelry, but I thought, hey, I could do another photo shoot and get the models to dress like vampires, and, oooh, what if we had a show/exhibit afterwards, of all the work? I hated asking my resident photographer, Jessica, to just do another show for free, but this was a way we could both potentially come out ahead. She gets to show off her photos, I show off my jewelry... everyone's happy.

And then it kept growing from there. I roped in another photographer, four models, and we shot on location at Prague, an underground nightclub straight out of Transylvania, with all its gargoyles and brick walls and old-world decor. The photos all look great -- I was second-guessing myself and wondering if all this planning was going to pay off, but y'know, I'm happy just to have those pictures. I didn't take them myself, but they wouldn't have existed if it weren't for that initial late-night brainstorm.

So it's all underway. The event is next Friday, October 30, the night before Halloween. I've dubbed it "Vampire Night" -- a nice, simple title that gets the idea across. We've been advertising and planning and putting up flyers -- I hope we get a good turnout. Mostly I hope it's a success so that I can justify doing it again -- I've already got ideas churning for future photo shoot/events. Maybe this'll be the start of something pretty damn cool!

We shall see.

-Astra

Jewelry Slide Show

It's really pretty amazing what you can do on the internet these days. I remember laboriously writing out code just to change a background -- now everything's made easy and all the code is done for you. Anyway, I was browsing the forums on Etsy and saw that some folks had made slide shows of their stuff, so I figured that couldn't hurt. More excuses to play with pictures, and this time you can add music, too!

So here's my slide show. If you don't like the music, just click on the little volume icon and it'll turn itself off. I think it's a pretty song, though; I browsed through quite a few selections before I found this one.

(Edited to add) I decided to link rather than embed -- it's less intrusive that way. Click here to see the slideshow.

As always, you can find the jewelry itself at: astraeadesigns.etsy.com.

Thanks!

-Astra