tinahdee

Some brilliant artists (and writers I might add) sketch their designs on paper before creating them. These designs might come to them in the middle of the night, and I imagine them groggily reaching for the notepad and pencil beside the bed to make a rough drawing that can be fleshed out in the morning. Other set aside a special time each day to work on new designs. Such discipline, I am sure, results in a steady stream of creativity.

For me, designs come in a much more haphazard way. Sometimes I don’t even really feel qualified to call myself a jewelry “designer” for just such a reason. I do design all my pieces, but to call myself a designer sort of makes it sound like I’ve been at this for professionally trained decades – and that’s just not the case. Anyway, my designs sort of just float through my head and I try to grab them and hold them. They’re never completely “unfuzzy” in this infant state – my main task is to tie an anchor to them to let them float but keep them from floating away. I miss a good percentage of them, and they go off into my brain sky, getting smaller and smaller until I can’t see them anymore, so high that they must eventually pop and fall back down to the soil of creativity in my head, to sprout again as something quite different on another day.

I never sketch my designs. I think that must be an awesome way to capture ideas, but it just doesn’t work for me. I think it’s because my designs remain fuzzy throughout the process, until they are finally brought into focus by the medium and by my hands. To draw the design is to commit it to something before it is ready to be committed, and that act consigns it to death.

The way my weird brain works is that I have a kind of shape-shifting idea, not really totally sure where I’m going with it, and I sit down and start working with the metal or the gemstones or whatever it is. And the idea responds to the movement and activity in my hands and begins to flow, almost as if it were electricity that was powering my body, and the idea comes to life. Sometimes it is quite different from what I thought I saw in my mind – but it is always either recognizable to me, or a logical progression from the fuzzy picture in my brain. Sometimes I might even think that my final design was the result of a “mistake” – but I have begun to learn that there are very few actual mistakes when it comes to designing this way. What I think is a mistake is just an unexpected direction. When I set the “mistake” down and come back to it another day, I can many times see the original intent and not just an error.

One of my most popular designs is my Bud and Leaf ring. This ring is the result of one of those “mistakes”. Originally it was supposed to be a simple ring with a little concave domed disc soldered on. But the disc got too hot and it crumpled a little and got crooked. I grabbed the pliers and pinched one side of it – I honestly can’t remember why now – and it looked just like a little leaf. So I melted a bit of silver into a ball and soldered that right next to the leaf. “No one will ever take a ring like this seriously,” I thought, “after all, it’s a mistake.” I set the ring aside for three months, never really intending to do anything with it except maybe melt it down for scrap.

But I found the ring again one day while rummaging around on my (rather cluttered) bench, and it was at this time that I could see the intent of the design and I knew that was what the ring was meant to be all along. It just took some time for me to realize it. Such is life – not just in designing jewelry, but in every area.

Bud and Leaf Ring, from Sterling $27