Handmade Jewelry Blog by Copper Reflections publishes articles related to wholesale handmade jewelry business.

Native American Jewelry Unique Jewelry Native Handmade Bracelets Earrings With Legends

Native American jewlry, Native Indian bracelets, Native handmade bracelets

Native American jewlry, Native Indian bracelets, Native handmade bracelets

Native American Jewelry is a type of jewelry that has meaning. All the native animal symbols have meaning and historical stories behind them. All these stories and legends behind the Native American designs for Native Jewelry and Native crafts makes them more valuable for people who cherish this meaningful ancient art form.

Animals, sun, moon and nature plays a big role in Native American cultures. In Native American Indian jewelry earrings and art you will always see representations, symbols and totemic designs of animals and nature. Each animal and nature has meaning and stories behind that goes back centuries told from father to son. For example the bear is a symbol of power, strength and healing. The Bear is held in high respect by all, as it is beloved as an elder family member of the human race. When hunted and killed the body of the bear was generally taken to the chief’s dwelling and showered in eagle down, which is a gracious symbol of welcoming friendship. There is no meaning if you are not fully ‘into’ native culture. There is no real connection if you don’t know what you are doing. If you want to know what the eagle represents? In a word; God. But that is just one word. Here are a few more: The power, the challenge, the knowledge, nature, culture, the connection, the bridge. The eagle can represent many things, depending on the tribe. The circle can represent life. The eagle is the master of the sky, carries prayers, and is known for itch courage and wisdom.

Native American metalwork jewelry, before colonization, the metalwork used in Native American jewelry bracelets making was fairly simple. The craftsmen would mainly hammer metals such as silver and copper to make jewelry pieces such as pendants, earrings, and even necklaces. They would then etch the design on the surface of the metal. It was only during the 1800s that Native American tribes such as Navajo, Hopi, and Pueblo learned the art of silver smithing from the Spaniards. This led to a revolution in the Native American jewelry design, especially in the Southwest regions of America. This resulted in the creation of unique Native American jewelry pieces including Squash Blossom necklace, the turquoise inlay ring called Navajo, Hopi silver bracelets in overlay style.

Native American jewelry, Native handmade Earrings, Native hummingbird jewelry

Native American jewelry, Native handmade Earrings, Native hummingbird jewelry

The Native American craftsmen knew the art of fine grinding stones such as turquoise, coral, and shell beads in order to make Native jewelry dangle earrings pieces such as heishi necklaces. But their skills were not limited to just this. These craftsmen could make delicate carvings on the surface of bone and carved wood. They knew how to stitch over a thousand beads together, and to soak and piece together a quill made out of a porcupine. Today, while most of these skills are extinct, some of the art forms are still being practiced by people. Some young Native Indian handmade jewelry artists have taken it upon themselves to revive the porcupine quill work.

Native American jewelry is recognized all over the world for its unique jewelry designs. Traditionally, Native American Indian jewelry involves handcrafted or handmade jewelry with hand stamped designs, beads, flowers, and leaves around the gem. Such jewelry is sometimes designed with symbols and geometric patterns, and is a beautiful unique jewelry item for any women. Each piece of handmade Native American jewelry is handcrafted in traditional Native Indian designs and motifs. There are several different varieties of handmade Native American jewelry available. The most impressive traditions of jewelry making in Native American jewelry belongs to Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, and Pueblo artisans who hand crafted silver stones into distinctive designs.

Wholesale Native American jewelry has a very rich history. Native American people have been making and wearing jewelry since time began. Finding all sorts of ways to decorate their bodies, faces, clothing, etc… Sometimes to show status within their social setting, and sometimes just to attract a mate. What some people find attractive, other definitely do not. Different Native tribes used different unique jewelry designs according where they lived. Different animal, wildlife and nature symbols gained different values of importance in their cultures. The differences in the symbols, patterns and designs come from their own interpretations of the colors, animals, nature and wildlife. The different surroundings and environments they lived in really dictated what was available to them to work with in creating their Native American jewelry designs.

Handcrafted Jewelry Handmade Bracelets Unique Earrings Photography Tips

Handmade Jewelry-Handmade Earrings-Animal Jewelry
Handmade Jewelry-Handmade Earrings-Animal Jewelry

I personally think that taking good photos is more difficult than making our handmade jewelry! Everything has to be perfect to do justice to your handcrafted artisan jewelry. A picture is worth a thousand words if you’re a writer; a picture is priceless if you are trying to market your jewelry and unique gifts online!

Handmade jewelry, animal jewelry photography is too important to leave to chance. Waiting for the sun to be exactly right is okay if you don’t have anything better to do but time is money and both are in short supply! You don’t have to wait for the cloud to pass or the direct sun to be on the left. Actually most of our pictures have been taken in the wee hours of the morning, once you get everything right it’s like you just can’t stop! If you are serious about taking great pictures you need a studio set-up. It’s not difficult and not too expensive considering the online marketing advantages.

We made our own light tent by making a cube and covering it with white rip-stop nylon fabric, cost about $20 to make. Let me know if you need instructions. We use  three 5200′K spotlights (daylight) about $35 each. We use studio stands (kinda costly) but swing arm lamps work too, just less adjustable. We bought a professional digital camera with a great macro lens, it hooks up directly to the computer and you just press enter so no shaky out of focus shots. The photos come up on the monitor so you can adjust the coloring, etc. You just set up the first item getting it just right, then replace it with the next item so photo shoots go quickly. Touch ups are at a minimum if the photos are taken well. There will always be those really shiny pieces that when zoomed in at 5000 times the actual size you will see yourself taking the picture. Smudging tools work well in those cases!

Take your time to learn about your camera and all the features, it will make your life much easier. Experiment with background colors but we have found that nothing shows our handmade jewelry as well as a white background. Make sure your designs stand out emphasizing the unique features of each piece. It is all about experimenting and finding the perfect settings for each photograph.

This maybe is extreme for someone just starting out but we have been making handcrafted jewelry and unique gifts for over 23 years and we have over 3,000 items! Photos are extremely important especially when marketing online and well worth the investment.

If you have any special tips or tricks that help to take great photos, I’d love to hear from you! We all need all the help we can get!

Best of Luck to everyone, Jenn

How To Optimize Handmade Jewelry Wholesale Jewelry Websites For Google

Handmade Jewelry-Handcrafted Copper Earrings-Wolf Jewelry

Handmade Jewelry-Handcrafted Copper Earrings-Wolf Jewelry

Getting your handmade jewelry website online is the easier part of having a handmade jewelry or animal jewelry website. You have to put lots of effort to make your wholesale jewelry website to the top pages in Google search so prospect customers can find you.

Search engine optimization is essential for handmade jewelry internet marketing. The handcrafted jewelry business is very competitive with millions of websites clamoring for top ranking in the search engine result pages. Using the right techniques can be challenging for wholesale jewelry marketers. Creating handcrafted jewelry is in itself a full time job so many people can not devote a great deal of time to their websites. It is important to use search engine optimization correctly to achieve the best results in the least amount of time.

Search engine optimization begins with the website. In order to make the unique jewelry website optimized effectively, it is important to keep in mind that each web page is separate and should have its own keywords. This means that not only the homepage needs to be optimized, but each page should also be optimized using the most appropriate keywords and long-tailed keyword phrases.

When employing search engine optimization techniques to the web pages, you must identify the main concept a page talk about and base the main keywords and phrases from that. For handmade jewelry websites most have pages for handmade earrings, handmade bracelets and handcrafted necklaces so focus on those keywords and related keywords. It is best to have only two or three phrases per page.

The title tag, meta description and meta keywords tags of each page should also be optimized with the chosen keywords and phrases. It is crucial to make the title tag and meta description attractive to your customers as well as the search engines. Most major search engines will use the title tag and description on the search engine results pages which means that this is what people will be reading once they search for a query relevant to your content. The meta keywords tag is not used by most search engines anymore but it is worth including just in case.

XML Sitemaps are great for making sure that Google and the other engines will be able to spider your entire site. While an XML sitemap will not directly impact your search rankings it can help as Google is more likely to see any changes more quickly and this in turn might have an impact.

Make sure that the most important pages on your site can be reached with as few clicks as possible from your home page. The fewer clicks you need to get to a web page, the more important is that web page.

Registering your site with Google Webmaster Tools would help you to find out any noted errors. This will help you solve some of the problems that you might have with your handmade earrings website.

It is a very good idea to have robots.txt file for your wholesale jewelry website. This is the first file all search engines look for every time they visit your site. Placing a blank robots.txt file in your root folder will not help with search rankings, it will help reduce 404 errors appearing in your log files.

It is always better to have pages that download fast as this will impact your organic search rankings. It is best to keep your load time to as little as possible. Faster downloading pages will keep your visitors longer at your website, instead of getting bored and leaving soon. So try to get your pages downloading fast and give your site visitors the best experience possible.

Server Up time is another important issue when it comes to optimizing your website as it will be a rather significant issue. If Google comes to visit your site once and it is down, not to worry, they will come back, but if Google visits your site often only to find that it is unavailable, you can find yourself with drastically down in rankings.