The Letter I Almost Didn't Write

I wasn't going to write this. I sat down to it twice this week and stood up again both times, on the grounds that the story is a little too private. The thing about telling someone how you got to the work you do is that you have to admit how close you came to never doing it. I find that uncomfortable. So you'll forgive me if I take a moment to get to the point.

When I was younger I was supposed to do something practical. There was a script. There was a careers advisor who said the word "stable" so often that I began to imagine my future as a kind of large warm building with no windows. I had relatives with opinions. I had the prospectuses on my desk. I had a small life laid out in front of me and very nearly walked into it.

And then one afternoon — and this part I remember the way you remember a piece of music — someone put a small file in my hand and showed me how to take a tiny burr off the edge of a piece of silver. The metal made a tiny noise. The room got very quiet. I made the burr disappear. I did it again on another edge. The afternoon passed without me noticing it.

It wasn't the silver. It was the quiet.

Anyone who has ever found their work knows what I mean by this. It isn't the material. It isn't the discipline. It's the quality of the silence you fall into when you're doing it. That silence was the loudest thing in the room and I knew, the way you know about weather, that I would never be all right again unless I followed it.

What followed was years of learning a trade in private. Hand-building. Filing. Soldering. Stones, settings, kilns. Cleaning the bench at night. Reading books written by people I would never meet. Failing, often. The first few pieces I made were not the pieces I had in my head. The next few weren't either. The trade is patient with you in a way nothing else has been in my life. It assumes you will get better. It is correct.

I've been at the bench long enough now to know what I gave up to be here, and long enough to know I'd give it up again. The hands of mine that opened your last package, the ones that wrote out the little card with the piece's name — those hands had no business being a jeweller's. They learned. Anyone's can, given the silence to fall into.

I'm telling you this because I think most of what gets sold as "the maker's story" is a kind of marketing fiction, and you deserve the real one. The real one is that I almost didn't. The real one is that the work chose me by being quieter than anything else. The real one is that everything I send you was made by someone who is, on her best days, still amazed she's allowed to do this.

If anything I've ever made is sitting on your dresser this morning — thank you. I made it for someone, and you turned out to be them.

Over the Sundays ahead I'll write about the work itself — the silver that forgets its shape, the enamel that goes through the kiln ten times, the opals with weather inside them. This was just where it started.

Come and find me at Paddington Markets one Saturday. The conversation is always better in person.