Jewelry, painting, writing

The world doesn't need this blog. But I do. This is a public space that feels semi-private, a useful illusion.

Dear Diary,
Today I started a blog...

I started making jewelry just last year after I saw a bracelet in a jewelry store that cost around $200. It was a long narrow suede strip with tiny gold beads sewn all along it. You wrapped it around your wrist several times and it closed with a button and loop. Very simple. I went to the local bead store, bought some suede lacing and gold-foil lined beads for under $20 and made myself a lovely bracelet. Not as labor-intensive as the one in the store, but a nice effect. Then I made a few for friends. Soon bead lust set in and then tool lust and metal lust and now, less than a year later, I've bought many tools, a small kiln, a tumbler, and turned a spare bedroom into a jewelry studio. I don't live off painting or jewelry-making, which means that I can love it without requiring it to support my life. I love my other work, but these days my fingers itch and images of jewelry that wants to be made run constantly through my head. I want to be making - everything else is a distraction. So why am I writing this? I need to get meta with what I'm doing. Not usually a problem for a professional intellectual. When I paint, there's always a problem I'm working on, maybe technical, maybe conceptual, something I'm trying to "solve" with the work. Not so much with jewelry-making, though it's coming along.

Here's another reason for this blog: I have a store on Etsy and I've been surprised to discover that I love writing descriptions for my pieces. Sometimes they take the form of little story fragments - but when the piece is sold, the story disappears. So I'm going to post the stories with pictures of the pieces here, so that they can live on in active cyberspace.