News

Garden of Silver is launching the Pendant Project and you are invited to
join us and add some beautiful color to your life!

Garden of Silver designer, Eileen Baumeister McIntyre, constantly designs and creates new handmade, one of a kind, fused art glass pendants that are wrapped in sterling silver.

Normally we sell these pendants in large quantities to museum shops,
galleries and boutiques throughout the country. The ‘Garden of Silver Pendant Project’ allows us to offer these pendants to you at a great value. 

Here is a quick video of some of the one of a kind pendant designs.

Garden of Silver will donate a portion of all proceeds of this gorgeous Golden Sunshine Collection to the GloblaGiving Hurricane Irma Relief charity. Let us spread some sunshine on the victims of Hurricane Irma.

Golden Sunshine Necklace


Tiny Golden Sunshine Necklace

Golden Sunshine Earrings

I am excited to announce my partnership with a wonderful company called VIDA. 
As a fine artist, as well as a jewelry designer, I am now able to have my artwork reproduced on tops, scarves, bags, wraps, clutches, tapestries and pillows!

It is so much fun now to create these coordinating collections where I can pair the Garden of Silver jewelry with the fashions.

Oranges Collection

'Oranges III' colored pencil drawing on this Oranges Top and Oranges Handbag.  Paired perfectly with the Seven Sisters handmade necklace.

Green Apples Collection

My 'Green Apples' watercolor painting inspired this collection of bright green Peridot Leaves earrings and Wintergreen necklace paired with the Green Apples top, scarf, wrap and clutch.

Oceans Collection

And a couple of my favorite colored pencil drawings, 'Wading River Rocks' and 'Tidal Pool' are reproduced on this racerback tank, mulit-wrap scarf and top. They all coordinate with the Sapphire Drift earrings and Tidal Pool necklace.

One of the best aspects of working with VIDA is their commitment to paying it forward by teaching literacy to their factory workers creating the fashions. As a teacher I love this.
Please enjoy browsing through this collection and sharing it with your friends. 
Thanks!

Please enjoy our first Video Lookbook of our garden inspired jewelry. Thank you to Ray Swift of Swift Visions Cinema ( @swiftvisions on Instagram ) for making it happen. Ray was one of my former students ( I've had him in my art classes since he has been in kindergarden! ) who has amazing talent and after seeing his new work I had to hire him to create this beautiful video for me. Also, thank you to these beautiful models Isabel and Julia for showing off my jewelry so gorgeously.

I just may use this video for my Superbowl commercial this winter! 

My garden is full of blooming Peony flowers today! I have used the Peony as inspiration for many of my fine art pieces in both colored pencil and silverpoint drawings.

This is an ongoing series that I have been working on using Silverpoint.  They are close up views of Peony flowers that grow every year in my garden. I spend hours photographing the flowers with my digital camera, cropping the images in Photoshop and then I print them out to use as reference photos.  I like to photograph in bright sunlight in order to get high contrast images-bright whites and dark shadows. 

What is silverpoint? Silverpoint is the art medium that the art masters, such as Rembrandt and Durer and Da Vinci used to draw with.  This technique/medium pre-dates the invention of the pencil. I discovered this medium while taking a Botanical Illustration class at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx.  The instructor, Laura Vogele, brought in an amazing drawing of a Locust bug that she created in silverpoint and I was mesmerized. Immediately I went and bought the supplies and got to work.

The way it works is that a piece of sterling silver wire (a perfect art medium for a jewelry designer to use!) is placed into a mechanical pencil holder and drawn on a special clay coated paper. The silver will not work on any other paper.  Traditionally, the surface for drawing was rabbit skin glue, but I have issues with that, so it’s clay coated paper for me.  Silverpoint can not be erased, any mark that goes down, stays down so careful planning is required before beginning. 

Silverpoint drawing has a limited range of values that can be achieved so a careful rendering of the image is required or everything will be gray.  I make sure to save the white areas so my value scale will be more dramatic.  Another interesting element about it is that the silver in the drawing will slowly tarnish over time creating a warm patina, which I love. You can see in the above images how the silver turns into a warm grey.

On my drawing table today is a half finished silverpoint drawing of a bunch of asparagus. Planning on spending the weekend drawing. I will post the finished 'masterpiece' next week.

Here is the New Spring Jewelry display that I created for Garden of Silver Jewelry and Janet Schroeder Jewelry at Susan Rodgers Designs in Port Jefferson, NY.

I wanted to convey garden elements and still have the jewelry show well on a bright white background. I sketched butterflies, dragonflys, lotus flowers, lilypads, and daisies in pencil then carefully cut into sections of them with a knife. I make a large colorful watercolor painting that I placed behind the white paper then popped sections of my drawing out to hang the jewelry from. Fun! I think that I will use this display technique for my next trade show display.

Take a peek of the video on our Garden of Silver Instagram page. Thanks, let me know what you think!

I wish to thank all my family, friends and fans for an amazing six years of growth for Garden of Silver! It is extremely hard to run a successful small business and I have received a lot of help along the way. Thank you to my husband Thomas for being so supportive of my dreams. Thank you to my Mom for being there in the beginning standing under a tent on the streets of NYC in all types of weather (mostly rainy and windy!), helping with trade shows as we began to grow and being the best unpaid employee ever! Thanks to my cousin Nancy for working the Lincoln Center show with me in 100 degree sweltering weather. Thanks to my cousin Jackie for spending the day keeping me laughing at an incredibly slow trade show. Thanks to my Aunt Penny for flying to Atlanta and keeping me company at yet another trade show. Thanks to my friend Joe for hosting my first jewelry party, and all my coworkers for attending, which launched this business. Thanks to my cousins Kelly and Erin for hosting trunk shows and 'liking' my thousands of Facebook posts. Thanks to the rest of my family, Aunt Nancy, Aunt Kathy, Colleen, Kathleen, Meaghan, for buying tons of jewelry at those jewelry parties! Thanks to my friend Susan for being such a great mentor! Thanks to my jewelry teacher Kathleen for teaching me everything from saws and hammers to blow torches. Thanks to my business coaches Robin and Tracy for countless hours of advice and support and teaching me how to run a jewelry business like a pro. Thanks to my amazing production assistant Hayley for helping me fill hundreds of jewelry orders perfectly.  Thanks to the extremely helpful and supportive community of jewelry designers that are always there to help me roll with the punches and celebrate the good stuff. Thanks to my sister in laws Jen and Marlene for hosting jewelry parties and promoting my business to everyone they know. Thanks to my future sister in law Laura for working for hours at a time on the computer, all bundled up like a mummy in my chilly studio, as my marketing assistant. Thanks to my friends Carol and Patti for being there through thick and thin. Thanks to my favorite buyers, Sharon, Jackie, Susan, Nikki, Jill, Jenah, Ben, Nancy, Pierre, Melanie and Brooke. Thank you to all of my Facebook fans and followers of the endless social media outlets that I have to post on. It's exhausting but so gratifying to see your responses. Thank you to my customers for loving handmade, garden inspired jewelry! Thank you to my friends for helping me along this exciting journey! I appreciate you all for helping me to live my dream. XO

Now that the crazy busy holiday season is over it was time yesterday to get some inspiration for the new year. My husband Thomas and I headed into NYC to spend the day at one of my favorite places, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

I am planning on adding a little color to my jewelry with the new collection by enameling the silver through a variety of enameling techniques that I am currently experimenting with.

The botanical artwork in these gorgeous kimonos was breathtaking and the composition of flowers is perfect. They made me want to ditch my wardrobe and fill the closet with kimonos!

      
Here is a close up of Japanese fabric swatches along with stunning calligraphy.

   
Texture, shape and patina inspiration.

  
And, I am always fascinated with Koi fish. Our pond is too small for them. The dream is to create a huge pond on the property and fill it with Koi, lotus flowers, lily pads and frogs.  

Some breathtaking Tiffany stained glass masterpieces. And I couldn't resist a selfie with Tiffany!

    
Calder's mobile sparked some ideas as did this Jasper Johns encaustic painting.

  
I am always drawn to Japanese design elements. This Noguchi fountain will make you forget about all your stresses. So peaceful and calm. We have about five Asian lamps in the house, maybe time for a hanging one.

    
This detail of a marble sculpture also was incredible. If I can figure out how to get that texture in silver, that may be another new direction. 

It was so great getting recharged artistically by the extraordinary artworks at this world class museum. You really need a week, or more, to go through the museum because of its size and the amount art and artifacts that are there. We had total sensory overload after four hours! Loved it all, such a great day. I'm ready to sit down with my sketchbook and begin another new jewelry direction.

Here is a quick video of the behind the scenes process of creating jewelry using the ancient Keum Boo technique. This is originally a Korean technique of fusing pure 24k gold foil to pure silver, fine silver, through the use of heat and burnishing.

Starting with a sheet of fine silver, which is very soft and takes embossing beautifully, sandwich it between two textured brass sheets. The metal sandwich is then put through my rolling mill and the textures of the brass are transferred onto the fine silver through the pressure of the rollers.

The leaf shape is traced onto the embossed silver and then each piece is individually cut out with a saw. The silver leaves are then drilled with holes and sanded on the edges. Now they are ready to be heated up on the little hot plate.

As the silver is heating up, I cut out a tiny hydrangea flower shape from a sheet of paper thin 24k gold. Very carefully the gold piece is placed with tweezers onto the silver piece that has been heated. This process is a little stressful because the gold can easily tear or get blown off the silver at this point. The gold flower is then gently burnished down onto the silver with various metal tools using a circular motion.

The metals are permanently fused together through this process. It will usually take about a minute or two, depending on the heat which is between 500-700 degrees. There isn’t any glue or adhesive of any kind used, the fusing is done through the heat and burnishing.

I am in the middle of creating a series of new Keum Boo jewelry pieces. Some of them I will leave as is with the silver and gold combination and others I will dip into a silver blackening solution to create a gold and black combination. Here are some examples of the finished jewelry. As you can see through this video, each piece is a one of a kind original creation. No two pieces are alike.

Grasslands Earrings, Dogwood Earrings, Raven Earrings.

Hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes peek as to the magic that happens daily in my studio! Be sure to ‘Like’ Garden of Silver on Facebook and sign up for our VIP list to stay updated about new jewelry, events and secret sales. Thanks!

A special thank you to my Advanced Computer Graphics student, David Garcia, for editing this video!

I just found out that yesterday was 'National American Beer Day'. Who knew? Well, in honor of this All- American day I thought I would post some photos of the organic hops that I grew in my garden for my cousin John to use in his delicious homemade brews!

I had forgotten what type of hops that I had planted, but my cousin said they are called, 'Cascade'.
The plants were gorgeous and they grew all over a trellis my husband built creating a beautiful hops tunnel.

I was stalking a local hops grower to see when he picked his hops because I didn't know exactly what the correct peak picking time was. The first year I grew them I waited too long and then Hurricane Sandy blew them all over the neighborhood.

Here are images of my hops drying process in my food dehydrator then all packed up to ship to John and his brewing partner Mandy.

Here is John (wearing my Grandfathers lucky cowboy hat!) and Mandy creating their brews.  They created a pumpkin spice beer and a coffee stout using my hops in both as a finishing hop at the end of the final boil.

Mandy and John with their delicious masterpieces! Their brewery is called Hyland Dawn Brewing. Fun!

Save the date! I will be bringing in many new one of a kind pieces in all price ranges. There will be something for every taste! Bring your friends, refreshments will be served. I will also have a collection of my fine art drawings and paintings available.

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