A Return to the Comfortable

 

Sometime last week after struggling for a few months with white balance and F-stop and props and trying so hard to make my shop front page worthy, I realized it wasn't me.

 

I like texture.

I like it in my life and I like it in my work.

Layers and layers of beads that weave together deceptively simply but I know when I see them the truth of what lies under the surface.  

So I went back to an old background, but definitely my favorite.



 

It's actually a history book that my Grandmother used as a high school student growing up in Tennessee.

 It is in fact the history of Tennessee and its pages tell the stories of wilderness, slavery, secession, nullification and lines drawn between man that would ultimately demand their blood. 

I also found tucked between the pages a list written in her hand with the class officers laid out for the whole year.

A record of something that would have been so important to her at the time, but that time itself has absorbed until there is no one left to remember the meetings taking place around wooden desks.



I think of her everytime I hold that book and I'm glad that I abandoned the stark white for layers.

Layers of time, layers of history, layers of color, layers of texture.



 

I feel like it's much more a reflection of me, literally.

And I think my grandmother would have been proud not just to see her old book or her list of classmates, but to see what the hands of her grandaughter had created.

 

Oh, and somewhere in the middle of this, I reached a milestone for my little shop.

800 sales

I know numbers are just arbitrary and it's really the feedback that moves my soul and makes me feel like those of you who have supported me don't regret it and that you're enjoying weaving things from my pages of instructions, or you're proudly sporting that pendant or bracelet (and maybe it's become one of your favs).

 

Either way, please stay tuned, there will be a giveback of sorts coming up. 

Enjoy your weekend, friend.