Last year a good friend gave me a pair of red leather gardening gloves that are really too beautiful to use while grubbing in the dirt. Generous as the gesture was, I am not the sort of gardener who wears gloves. I like to feel the texture and temperature of the soil. I like to sink my fingers into a nice mix of sand, bone meal and humus when I prepare a spot for recalcitrant poppies and lavendar. Though they might keep my hands and nails from being brutalised, gloves get in the way. I feel like a wuss when I wear them.
Early in the season, a hard day of sewing the abominable trees of heaven that find their way into my Nanking cherries and lilacs, makes my hands look like they belong to a wussy urban gardener. Today, after clearing beds for snow peas and sunchokes, I earned broken nails, abrasions and blisters. No matter. During my thirty some years of gardening and seven years as a metalsmith, I learnt that a certain amount of discomfort comes with the territory. Sure, there are times when I would like to be Vita Sackville-West, mistress of a bevy of hired hands in charge of grunt work. Quite often, at the jeweler's bench, I wish I were Faberge or Spratling and leave the uncomfortable tasks for minions. Somehow, I doubt that I would enjoy either gardening or silversmithing as much, I have no castle--I garden in a half acre lot. My silversmithing clients are every bit as discerning as Russianj aristocrats, but they have a smaller budget. I think that I am doing what I have always been meant to do--gardening and making jewelry my own way, gloves off, all senses on the job.

Bronzite, faceted smoky quartz, and mookaite for inspiration.

WIP--Chrysoprase beads and silver necklace.

THINK GLOBALLY?

Sometimes one has the urge to torch things. At such times, it helps a great deal if one remembers to have one's propane torches filled up and ready to go. That is something I failed to do and to complicate matters, my butane torch, the workhorse of my jewelry making adventures, went kaput. There is always the scary hot MAPP gas torch which I use for serious stuff, like reticulation, but it is no fun to use on hot and humid days. The thing to do then is get beady. Today, I am making silver leaves that will be dapped and hammered to form a necklace along with chrysoprase beads. I am not quite sure whether this design is the one I want. I could use silver beads and add cabochons--perhaps opal or moonstone--the the leaves. That would call for soldering and soldering calls for a new butane torch. It seems that I will have to buy one anyway. In order to dangle gracefully, those leaves need soldered findings--loops. Drilling the top of the leaf and inserting a wire loop might work too. I will experiment.

Against my better judgement, I agreed to do a show in Maryland, in autumn. Junior is all for it. Her homemade soap and felted bags are usually a hit and she gets to meet other artisans. My jewelry is too expensive for country fairs and at best I sell half a dozen pieces. The good thing is that a couple of the buyers might become loyal patrons, returning to commission new projects. All in all, we artisans work for the love of the craft. Few of us are able to leave their day jobs and yet we persist, knowing that we are competing with ill-paid Third Word craftspeople for whom a dollar an hour an acceptable salary. My hometown has a silver shop that sells jewelry made in Bali and India and the Smithsonian sells quilts made in China. I am not sure who benefits from globalization. Perhaps it is good that the Balinese, Indians get paid a dollar an hour. I have slightly higher overhead and therefore I need a better salary that is better than that. Perhaps it is ethical to buy inexpensive crafts made by Chinese political prisoners whose working conditions would give OSHA inspector cardiac arrest. You get decide; Third World craftspeople usually cannot.

The ideal, Better Home and Gardens.

The reality, my craft room.

The ideal, from Better Homes and Gardens. The reality, my writing room.

Sterling silver pin with citrine briolet, pearls and garnets

STRANGE ATTRACTORS ?

"Control of chaos is the stabilization, by means of small system perturbations, of one of these unstable periodic orbits. The result is to render an otherwise chaotic motion more stable and predictable, which is often an advantage. The perturbation must be tiny, to avoid significant modification of the system's natural dynamics."


I think of in German, machen ordnung, to make order. It is a brutal process that requires a brutal language. Basically I have to tear a place apart before I can rearrange in a way that allows me to use for a certain purpose. In this case, the space is my study, the place where I use to conduct interviews and write, back when I worked for commercial newspapers. After I decided to write for non-profit organisations, I moved my writing quarters to another room and remade my former office into a silversmith's office.

Formally trained silversmiths usually have immaculate work spaces. They arrange their jeweller's benches according to an age old pattern. That makes sense. Much of silversmithing is precise work. It requires orderly surroundings. many silversmithing tools are delicate and expensive. Some rust easily and it does not do to neglect them.

Having said that, I will admit to keeping my bench in an apparent state of chaos. That is, to a trained silversmith my bench looks like a pigsty. Yet I can find my tools blindfolded. It is true that I have only killed two sets of aviation grade cutters, but that happened over a period of eight years and I have learnt not to use them to hold piece of silver I am heating wth a MAPP (liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) mixed with methylacethylene-propadiene) gas torch. The combustion temperature of MAPP gas 5300 °F ( 2927 °C ), great for melting silver and one's good, expensive aviation cutters.

Here and there I make a piece of jewelry that makes someone happy. It is a skill to have. Writing is cleaner, but the creative process is no sweeter than making a drawing and rendering it into metal. I practice both crafts in rooms where there must be some order--my kind of order, not decorator magazine's prissy, photographable prettiness. See for yourself.