The Life and Times of the Plume
I Love Your Soul
Here’s some of the work of my hands and my heart from the past two weeks of my life. I’m not sure what’s more fun, making these earrings or wearing these earrings! I love these designs, they’re such itsy bitsy builds. Every blade stroke of my saw, every hammer strike, every glide of the burnisher is prayer.
Available tomorrow in my shop at 8PM (mountain time zone).
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Glowing prehnite, an adorable ruby, crosses, ferruginous hawk talon and beautiful open framework on an opera length chain — there’s some prototyping going on in the studio this week. I’ve returned to a frame element I used years ago in this earring design:
…the same but different. Reinvented. No matter how much time passes there are some design elements I simply like, some stones I prefer, some motifs I claim as creative “home” for myself. I used to think there was something wrong with that, that I should always be moving forward at a specific pace in my work, that my exploration should have a consistent rate of speed, that I should not tarry. But I think it’s good to linger where I feel like lingering, to explore my motifs at a rate of speed I’m comfortable with, to circle back to old ideas and redesign them. I’m just playing around this week trying to parse out a creative direction for the month but who knows where a few days of playing will lead me.
Since taking these photos I have already altered this necklace design. I removed the ruby. It didn’t jive. Which is what this is all about, I guess. Trying things and liking them, or not, and going with it.
I started out small in the first week of January. SOS Earrings and Light Burden Rings. Available in my shop as of today.
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The final, small offerings of 2018 bound for my shop — well, except those Brio Earrings…they’re pretty big.
Thank you all for your support this year and for choosing to gift my work to your friends and family.
+Of The West+
This is the second installation in my Sagebrush statement necklace series. It features a gorgeous cut of plume agate. I’ve been calling this stone the “Genesis” stone. It’s utterly cosmic looking and the plume itself holds a flashing stream of pyrite that catches light just so. It speaks to the beginning of all things, but also, the small beginnings we face every single day as humans. The spark that leads to combustion and creation. The simple effort of getting out of bed in the morning. The repetitive motion of inhaling and exhaling. The birth and death of our cells. Our hands and the work they do. The daily rejuvenation of our spirits. Genesis. The Beginning.
When I finish a large statement piece like this I usually take a moment to count how many solders built the piece, I like to have a quantifiable sense of what went into the making of something. I like to sit back and remember every hammer strike (as it happens, each sage leaf in this piece was struck about fifty times with two different hammers while texturing and forming). This piece contains 142 solder points (large and small) — the sage leaf fringe required 82 of those solders. That’s so much work, so many small things that build a beautiful whole.
+Of The West+