Pagoda Earrings
Every story has a beginning. Mine starts when I was around eleven or twelve. See, I was in middle school in a fairly wealthy suburb of Columbus, Ohio.
All the girls would get their friends presents for Christmas – fairly inexpensive gifts, but costs add up. Since I had an older sister that my parents were helping with college (and an older brother who had just finished college a few years earlier ), my parents understandably put a price limit on my gift-giving budget. My very creative sis came to my rescue: she taught me some basic wireworking skills, took me to a local bead shop, and taught me how to make simple earrings.
From then on, the somple cost-saving measure of DIY jewelry as gifts became a bit of a hobby, which turned into an on-again/off-again passion. I didn’t do much in the way of fabrication until later in high school, when I began hammering, shaping and filing scraps of copper wire to make bracelets and rings.
By the time I got to graduate school, I had all but abandoned jewelry in favor of other artistic outlets. While the university I attended offered jewelry making courses, the resulting work was intimidating both in terms of cost and accesibility. A lot of the work was really cerebral: symbolic pieces that seemed to be meant for display rather than actual use.
I only recently got back into making jewelry, possibly because of the academic intimidation, though I have no one to blame but myself for that. I’ve been doing a lot of self-instruction: remembering techniques some of my friends from university had demonstrated and relying heavily on the graciousness of the Internet. The way I figure it, the learning is going to be messy, but the knowledge (and the resulting pretties) is a huge reward.