Hello, and welcome to the first installment of “Team Tuesday.” My name is Jen, and I’ll be your host for this posting. Before I start talking about myself, allow me to explain what “Team Tuesday” is. Team Tuesday is a way for us folks at Tuesday Creative to speak about ourselves and what we are passionate about outside of the workplace. It’s a space for us to showcase things we have worked on or are currently working on that aren’t related to our company. Basically, it’s a way for us to let our readers know more about the people behind Tuesday Creative. So without further adieu, I present to you ramblings (with occasional coherent thoughts) about my new acrylic jewelry line, plastique*.

I love tangible design. I work as a web designer by day, but what I love more than anything is being able to hold the things I have worked on in my hands. For this reason I’m a huge supporter of keeping print design alive. Brochures, business cards, pamphlets, posters, etc. I love it all. Well, as long as it’s well-designed. I cry when I think about all the fabulous magazines that are just dying to the digital age. And don’t even get me started on how much I LOVE letterpress. In fact I did a whole post dedicated to one letterpress piece awhile back. But I digress. I love tangible design, which is partly why I started making my own jewelry.

I first started getting into acrylic jewelry about a year and a half ago when I saw a few random necklaces and rings floating around; most notably by:AMT‘s well-known diamond acrylic ring. I thought to myself, “I can totally make that kind of stuff.” Moreover, “I want to make that kind of stuff.” I had a bunch of ideas but I didn’t have a way to cut acrylic. Then one glorious, magical, beautiful, bright, sunny afternoon (seriously, it was all of those things packaged into a day), I stumbled upon an Instructables tutorial on making laser cut acrylic jewelry. And it changed my life… At first I made a few simple pieces for myself only. I really liked how they came out so I started making more and decided to try selling them on Etsy. That was the birth of plastique*.

In the beginning I had very few sales. I also had very little product to sell. By that time there was already a lot of acrylic jewelry out there on the market. Lots of very fanciful and frilly type jewelry. The type of jewelry that I think looks really nice but I wouldn’t necessarily wear. I decided to focus my efforts on my “design” related jewelry such as my “helvetica” and “avant garde” necklaces or my KERN ring set since I didn’t really see much of that out on the market and we design nerds need an outlet! Of course, not all my pieces are “designer.” My love of retro, music, traveling, and pop culture have definitely found their way into some of my designs such as the turntable necklace and ring as well as the “tweet” necklace.

I hope to continue growing my line of jewelry with new and fresh ideas. It keeps me pretty busy so I have to take it slow or else it will consume my life and no longer be a “side business.” But it’s definitely gratifying to hear people say how much they dig my rings or that their friend really loved one of my necklaces that they gave them as a gift. It’s things like that which remind me of why I love to design in the first place.

To purchase any of the items you see above in the gallery go to plastique*.

And that’s all she wrote…