Spending My Birthday At The DYO Fabulous Pre Launch Party

It's hard to believe that it's been a week since my birthday - I normally spend my birthday with my family but this year was a little bit different. This year I spent some of my birthday with lots of other bloggers at an official NE1 Newcastle Week Fringe Event.

I love jewellery, fashion pieces, precious metal pieces, semi precious gemstones I love it all. So when I was invited to a pre launch party for a new jewellery brand, no matter what the date I knew I needed to go.

DYO Fabulous is a local North East brand which has been four years in the making. The owner and founder Janet was always a huge jewellery fan, but she was concerned about the ethics and foundations of a lot of the jewellery that we buy on the British high street - did you know only around 10% of jewellery that buy in the UK is actually made here? that's a pretty amazing statistic to be honest it shows how much of the fashion and jewellery that we buy is mass market.

Over the last few years Janet has travelled the world looking into the jewellery industry and researching and obtaining ethical suppliers of semi precious gemstones, beads, chains, fastenings and findings, in order to make ethical, high quality and bespoke jewellery.

The event took place in Nancy's Bordello, a popular bar on the outskirts of Newcastle city centre. We had the entire upstairs room to ourselves, to drool over some of DYO Fabulous' beautiful jewellery pieces, and munch on some of French Ovens' gorgeous vanilla cupcakes.

After we'd had a little chance to look around at some of the designs and components, Janet, gave us a little talk on the history of the brand and introduced us to some her staff - including design graduates from local universities.

As well as selling high quality, individual one off pieces from their website, DYO ultimately intends to introduce us to an entirely new concept of purchasing jewellery.

DYO stands for Design Your Own and that's customers will ultimately be able to do. Using a specially designed interface on their website, users will be able to custom design their own unique piece of jewellery, to fit their own needs, and their own budgets. The interface isn't "live" yet but we were given some examples of how it works and how accurately the pieces will be produced.

I am so excited for this to launch, I think it's something that I could spend literally hours on. I really love the concept and the fact that you can create something completely unique, that nobody else has. They also plan to introduce a bridal matching service to match and create items to match bridal gowns, a section for stylists and a service where we can remodel old or broken pieces of jewellery into something new.

The more I saw and heard the more excited I got - I wanted it all - everything was just so me -  :)

Thankfully there was a little sample sale and whilst I wanted everything again I was good and purchased just one thing

This gorgeous, elasticated  bracelet is made from goldstone - a gorgeous brown / copper semi precious gemstone filled with gold sparkles - it looks amazing in the pictures above but by using the flash you can really see the sparkles. There is a similar bracelet on the DYO site at the moment if your interested x

I was also lucky enough to win a prize in their lucky dip - I was lucky enough to pull out this lovely carved rose detail bracelet, I think there is a bit of rose quartz in it, which is a stone that I love.

All in all I had a fabulous time, and I was only disappointed that I couldn't stay long enough to make my own Princess necklace. The idea and concept, and the ethics behind the brand are first class and the quality and attention to detail is fantastic. I really wish Janet and the team every success with the venture and I'd like to thank them again for the invite. I will definitely be back for more in the future x To find out more please check out the DYO Fabulous website xx