BODY DECOR NEW LINE IS HERE!!!! I will have everything up on ETSY shortly. If you see anything you like or would like a special order just let me know. SEE A PREVIEW.

 

I AM NOT ALONE

This blog was really suppose to be about my story and my experience with the healing effects of jewelry making. I want to tell my story this way in hopes of some sort of cleansing. The thing is, that the more research I do the more I’ve come to realize that I am not alone in this. So many woman write about how making jewelry literally saved their lives.

As a jeweler I receive newsletters from all sorts of people in the business. They send tips on things from how to display your jewelry (which is very important), to how to market your brand (important as well). So my in box fills up with all of these helpful newsletters, but really, who in the hell has time to read all of this stuff.?Most of it goes right to my junk box; most,except for one newsletter that caught my attention immediatly. I think I keep going back to it because the author, Rena Klingenberg, doen’t try to sell me anything and is whole-heartedly dedicated to the craft herself. Rena reaches out to her fellow crafters to form a community. The newsletter is called Home Business Jewelery Success Tips: And Friendly Jewelry Community. Why am I babbling on about this you ask? Let me tell you, As soon as I started googling the topic on the theraputic effects of jewelry making and design, article after article popped up attached to her site. A huge, knowing smile spread across my face as I took note. It was like my own personal joke. Rena fucking Klingenberg, of course, it made perfect sense. I had emailed her a message of appreciation previously and she was quick to respond. I feel as if she is a fellow traveler in this hobby/lifestyle of ours. Finding all these women with stories like mine, on HER site of all sites, was slightly cathartic. Who are these women? Where do they come from? How did they get here? Read for yourself.

Meet Danica Losich: A Young Woman Battles Years of Intense Depression and Anxiety Through the Art of Jewelry Making

Meet Karen Seng: A Comical Look at Today’s “Therapy“

Meet Divya N: An Indian Women with  Nero Limitations Finds Happiness

I will come back to my story next post, but I wanted to share this with anyone who may be having similar feelings. We are never alone and someone else has already lived our story. Maybe we can learn from them.

~CRE8ORDIE~

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“Hobbies are self-nurturing activities. In loving ourselves-that is, nuturing ourselves for the purpose of spiritual growth” ~THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED, M. Scott Peck, M.D.

This story starts a couple a years back, when I met my soon to be ex-husband. It was the closest thing to love at first sight that I ever experienced. We met online and talked on the phone all day, every day. We seemed to have so much in common it was uncanny. When we finally did meet it was like we’d known eachother for years, literally. He was proclaiming his love by the end of the night (first red flag, stupid me). It’s alarmingly easy for quick relationships to happen online, because you find out so much about eachother prior to meeting that you think you’ve got it all figured out. I’m sure most of you know someone who’s played the game. I didn’t learn enough though. I sure as hell didn’t learn how much pain, confusion, loneliness, anger, guilt, suffering, and pure torture I would endure to be married and in love with an alcoholic. I didn’t even know what that the hell alcoholic meant. Weren’t all my friends alcoholics anyway? The answer was no, they were not, they were not the “leave a path of destruction everywhere you go” type of alcoholics. Well, maybe some where, but I didn’t marry them.

In the beginning of our relationship I didn’t do much crafting at all. I was way too busy doing nothing with my boyfriend to have time to make stuff. Geesh!! It wasn’t until I lost my job of 6  years, that the true co-dependant nature of our relationship started to chip at my sense of self. We, we, we, or him, him, him. That was all. My friend saw it from miles away and warned me over and over, but I was too stubborn, and too in love. I did however; feel the slightest twinge of what, heartburn maybe, gas? It was something, something that led to my initial and still beloved barretts. I made them like my life depended on it. I started with big, flowery, pin-up girl style , but then they became more and more elaborate. In my mind I had invented the concept of Victorian hair art. This absolutly obsessed me for days, and was able to take me away from “him”, into my own mind that was exploding with styles that would bring the fashion world to its’ knees.

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