My last blog as BeckyQoF

I can’t believe it’s finally here! On Thursday 31st January I’ll be making the big switch, officially becoming Cepheid Studio!

I’m actually not feeling too sentimental about the change at the moment - it’s been a long time coming, and I feel really ready to move forward with my business. I launched the pre-order for my first new Cepheid Studio product line last week (these constellation yoga pants - pre-order is open for less than 48 hours so get in there quick if you want some at the special price!) and your response was incredible! I really hope the rest of my re-brand goes down as well ;-)

I designed these astronomically accurate yoga pants from my studio right here in Paris. They show all 88 constellations (count ‘em!) which have been used for millennia to tell stories, for navigation, and as a frame of reference for other astronomical observations. Each culture maps these groups of stars slightly differently, so i’ve chosen to use the International Astronomical Union standards to make these leggings as scientifically accurate as possible. I’ve even drawn each star to scale relative to its neighbours.

Did you know that although the stars in a given constellation look like they’re close together, they’re actually incredibly far apart. For example, one of the stars in Orion is 243 light years away from Earth, whereas another is an incredible 1360 light years away. Wild! If we looked at the stars from anywhere else in the universe we wouldn’t be able to recognise the constellations at all because they’re specific to our unique vantage point. I’m sure humans would have come up with 88 new ones, though.

I’ve been showing you a lot of sneak peeks of my new branding over on Instagram, but there are some things I’ve been keeping secret until now. My backing cards for necklaces and earrings arrived last week and I’m so pleased with them! It was really hard not to show you right away, but I wanted to wait until I’d had time to take some good pictures of them. It’s been really dark and snowy in Paris lately so I had to wait a while for the sun to come out!

Inspiration behind my new branding

‘Cepheid variables’ are pulsating stars which allow astronomers to measure distances in space. In 1908 Henrietta Swan Leavitt discovered that there was a strong relationship between the luminosity of these Cepheid variables, and how fast they were pulsating. This meant that, if we observe the pulsation rate of a Cepheid variable, we also know its luminosity. And if we compare this intrinsic luminosity to the apparent magnitude we can observe from the Earth, we can calculate how far away the star is. BOOM! They’re like astronomical rulers! I’ve incorporated the idea of measurement precision into each of my Cepheid Studio branded items with ruler tick marks at 2mm intervals. And can you guess what sort of necklace I’ll be releasing next week alongside my rebrand…?!