Page Tags: artisan handmade jewelry, bead items jewelry box art supplies wholesale, natural body jewelry

Lord of the Engagement Ring: New Online Retailer Sparks a Revolutionary Turnaround in Today's World of High Quality Diamond Jewelry.

…more accessible, so we decided to change the way jewelry was bought and sold," Banker said. "Sales are expected to go up by 300 percent this Christmas season."

Consumers are showing a great deal of interest in the diamond solitaire engagement ring collection and the u karat and 1 karat diamond jewelry are already selling like hotcakes, she added.

DiamondOcean.com is an e-commerce website hosted by Marquise Gems Pvt. Ltd. The company is located in India from where it manufactures and retails jewelry like diamond earrings, diamond necklaces, diamond pendants, bracelets and charms, bangles, watches, complete diamond sets and loose diamonds -- as well as a huge engagement ring collection. Although the production quality is high, the pricing is comparatively low -- which is a big bonus of being based in a low labor cost country. The company is making most of the fact that it is not financially viable for other retailers to sell their jewelry at such low prices because of being based in developed nations and the overpriced maintenance that comes along with it.

DiamondOcean.com has also revolutionized the way jewelry is customized by taking it a couple of steps further. Other retailers, at the most, let their customers change the size of the diamond, but at DiamondOcean.com the customer gets the complete freedom…

…the National Archive and Record Administration put the paper on microfilm.

Ancestry.com digitized the documents to make them available to view from a personal computer -- a task that took a combined 6.6 million hours of labor.

According to the company's analysts, it would take an estimated 3,144 years for one person to replicate the U.S. Census collection.

If printed pages of the documents were placed end-to-end, the company says, the paper would run

the distance of New York to Los Angeles .

"The images of the handwritten documents breathe life into the stories," Sullivan said. "It gives a sense of real-life to see occupations, cost of homes and birth places of ancestors."

Take the family of Elvis Presley as an example. A quick search brings up documents that show Presley's family was the only one its street to own a home -- but Elvis must have gone elsewhere to learn about music. According to the census information, Presley's family did not have a radio.

A federal moratorium is in place that states 72 years must pass before census information can be made available to the public. The 1940 census will be available in 2012.

Sullivan said the company pursued international records to aid American genealogists in pre-census research beyond the shores of the United States. Ancestry.com has also created databases using census data from the United Kingdom and Canada. Those databases were completed in April.

Ancestry.com is owed by MyFamily.com, which also runs Genealogy.com and Rootsweb.com. MyFamily.com allows families to share photos, stories, recipes with one another. In July, as a result of the census project, Ancestry.com will begin displaying photos and other documents that have been found.

Ancestry.com charges…

…

Wooden fruits & vegetables ($1.50+). Haba (Habermaass); Skaneateles, N.Y.

The Orchard ($40) & Sleepy Princess & the Pea games ($24). Haba

Novelty boxed onesies & baby T-shirts ($22). Urban Smalls; New York

Floor puzzles & wooden sound puzzles ($10). Melissa & Doug

Infant stackers & pull/push toys ($15+). Melissa & Doug (pictured )

Knight, wizard, dinosaur figures . ($6-14); Schleich; Ottawa

Decorate-Your-Own Porcelain Piggy Bank ($6). Melissa & Doug

Stikfas ($4.50+). Saizon; Montreal

PlasmaCars "are a pretty big year-round item" at Sprout, according to owner and buyer Kristin Vailliencourt. "The floor of our store is a really smooth surface. We keep one out and people buy them for their basements and take it indoor/outdoor."

The shop also carries a number of wooden toy lines, such as Haba. "We have their whole fixture of fruits and vegetables, and we give a free little linen grocery bag when [kids] buy six food items," Vailliencourt says. "It's kind of fun--like market day!" In addition, Sprout offers a wide range…

…of poets, styles and faiths.

To find Longfellow's "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport" is no surprise. But the editors shrewdly echo that with Emma Lazarus' less-well-known "In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport."

As a Robert Frost fan, I liked finding such staples as "Once by the Pacific." I was even happier to discover his lovely "A Prayer in Spring." ("Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white/ Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night.")

This is not, per se, an inspirational volume. Many of the poems address doubt or take an unusual angle on faith. Example: James Wright's "Saint Judas."

Any anthology picks a fight. Why a Thomas Dorsey hymn but none by Fanny Crosby? Why no Wendell Berry, yet six poems from A.R. Ammons, including one called "For Harold Bloom"?

I think I know why. But this anthology is, on balance, a great blessing.

_Sam Hodges

___

WEB SITE OF THE WEEK

www.tenthousandvillages.com

Ten Thousand Villages is an organization that promotes fair trade by buying handcrafted goods from artisans around the world and selling those goods _ online, in stores and through special markets.…