While we wait, Fishtail Braids

(Photo by Free People)


Dear five or so subscribers and future readers, I am working on a piece about the importance of buying handmade and how it can be, in this increasingly dehumanized and mechanical world, understood as a radical act, a very powerful act. In this piece I will link our ancient prehistory with the always-with-us, deeply inherent need to create and to see the seasons of things from seed to fruition and onward and how the mass production of most of the things we use and need has rendered our once treasures to worthless trash and how that is taking a huge toll on our mental health and our very souls. But, until that is finished, I offer you a tutorial I found that teaches you how to do a herringbone braid because I absolutely love them. In the next post, I will be the Sarah Connor of crafts, saving the world from the evil machines, but while we wait for the redeemer- braids! Braids and Braids and braids. Girls been doing it since the beginning.

Hearts #1

Once a week, I will share a selection of handmade goodies I find on Etsy and elsewhere that I think are incredible and worth checking out! This weeks theme: WILD, UNFETTERED, AND FERAL.

Tribal Hoop Feather Earrings by Radhas Love Designs


Now, I don't mean to get all Clarissa Pinkola Estés on your asses, but when it comes to crafts, I really appreciate the wild side. So often, the art and craft world seems monopolized by an older generation making safe, cutesy things like cinnamon wreathes and plush toys. God love em, I am not saying I don't loves me a cinammon wreathe as much as the next person with a nose, but once in awhile I just want to see people break through and make something that surprises me, even shocks me:


"Torro," by Masha Vereshchenko


Oh my, look at that! O gorgeously dark and bizarre genius. Keep your fairies and barbie faced disney mermaids, give me the tortured girl who is half creepy caterpillar, half tattooed darkness, taunting the huge fly with her imaginary horns. Is that even a fly? What is that? Is that what she is destined to transform into? Yes, please. Give me all the girls who see themselves as half bug or beast, at least sometimes. I love art that dares to be bizarre, borders on terrifying while maintaining the tension with beauty to give a complete, complex perspective. So often we are afraid to give all of ourselves in art, but, like it or not, everyone has a shadow side. Like it a lot, that shadow side is usually way more interesting.


Pincushion Doll by Mercury Rusting


I've followed this artist's work for awhile now and I am sad to see him selling less on etsy. Has he given up? Has the mass obsession with pretty, happy crap pushed his eerily beautiful and dark works of madness aside? I hope not, because I appreciate his pieces so much and each one has a very interesting story to go with it. That brings up the best part of handmade- you are not buying something mass produced on a machine in a factory somewhere far away. You are getting something made by hands that truly loved each detail. A pincushion becomes a work of art with an irresistibly weird story.


Finally, another Pittsburgh based artist:


Quill Dangle Earrings by CrossFox


I love the whole aesthetic of this shop. I love the sharpness of these earrings against the soft beauty of the model. I love their wild, rustic feel. I love to see people connecting with the earth through natural adornment. I would want earrings like these over designer diamond and gold earrings any day of the week. I find the assignment of value to materials to be so arbitrary. Sure, sure- there is Mohs scale hardness and rarity and all of that, but to me the most basic mud and water, rock and bone materials are often far more alluring than the most expensive precious metals and stones. Not that I don't love sapphires and rubies, but you get me.

When I say, "Wild," I don't mean "Tribal." One day I will tackle the problematic usage of catch phrases like, "tribal," and "gypsy" and how, although they are loaded and perpetuate stereotypes and are sometimes plainly racist, they are also hard to not use when marketing jewelry if you want to reach your target audience and make it in the relevancy searches and actually keep yourself afloat financially as a jewelry artist. All of that in due time.

For now, if you are interested in any or all of these artists and some other picks, check out the Feral Treasury List I curated over there at Etsy. Click on some of the pics, too, because this increases our "hotness" and gives these deserving artists a chance of appearing on the front page via the featured treasury.

Wild Love,
Davka

So Stoned

Hi. I'm Davka and I'm a stone addict.




That's me. In my hands are some of my favorite gemstones: rhodochrosite, aventurine, amazonite, chrysoprase. After buying this lot from a friend, I kept taking them all out of their individual bags and arranging them carefully across my bed, the table, on the sleeping cat, my legs, everywhere. I would become lost in each stone and its intricate, naturally occurring beauty- the crystalline structures sparkling under the smooth glassy surface of the green aventurine like little bursts of stars at the birth of the universe, the forest green color so deep, it immediately evoked within me a primal desire to go running into the woods and to never come out again. Its dark, dense green was so arresting that I was sure it would stir even the most dormant imagination into a remembrance of ancient mysteries of the earth, the hunt, the animal in the human. I then took out the rhodochrosite and my mouth watered a little from the pink, so pink, pink so purely pink it made my mouth want to taste it as I would want to taste strawberry ice cream. I thought about its other name, "Inca Rose," and how the ancient Incas believed that rhodochrosite, in its purest rose color red, was the blood of their kings and queens kept forever in sacred stone. Wow! Then the Chrysoprase, Holy Mother, the Chrysoprase! Such a green! An apple green! A green so green it was like the poet Sherman Alexie said of his grandmother's apple tree, "The first green God ever made." The green...

"Davka?"
"Huh?" I looked up from my endless, shimmering stoner dream and into my boyfriend's eyes as he stood above me with a plate of food. "What's up?"
"I've been calling for you. Dinner's ready."
"Oh," I looked around the room and remembered where I was. In our living room with my lot of gemstones arranged in a sweeping spiral across the wooden floorboards. I laughed, embarrassedly. "I'm sorry. I didn't hear you."

He smiled, turning toward the kitchen and I stood up to follow him.

"You know," he said, "you're gonna have to give those up. You're going to use them and sell them."

Ugh! Ouch! It was true. I would one day part with every single stone as I used them in my designs, or, more accurately used my designs to give each stone its proper bed of beauty and silver and then, its destined home. For a moment this realization hurt. I tried to think of a way out of it. Maybe I could keep them, all of them? With my others, I have a substantial amount. Maybe, I could put them in the bathtub and sit with them every day for a few hours. Maybe I could polish every single one every morning until one day, like a Pharaoh, they can bury me with them, laying naked save for a simple cotton dress, surrounded by my bed of stones. Maybe...

Sigh, sweet stoner love, there is no way around it. I have to eventually give you up. Truly loving something means knowing it was never yours, right? Isn't that what they say?

"It's ok," I told my boyfriend, sobering up a bit as we ate together. "I am sending them out into the world to be worn by others and that is a great honor."

And it is. If I sound crazy for saying this, that's ok, because there's thousands of years of indigenous wisdom backing me up when I say it: stones are living beings. I know, I know, that's crazy or hocus pocus or New Agey, but call it what you want, I know it and I've always known it, even as a little girl and when I remember things I knew as a little girl, I trust them more than anything. Stones communicate intelligence, ancient history, creativity, and so much more. It is a great honor to work with them and to know that your work will be adored by the little girl inside of a woman who will gasp with delight when she opens the box and sees her new beautiful stone and the stone will be happy being seen and praised as the woman (or man!) walks around wearing it and the ancient shamans and earth-close ancestors inside of every viewer will blink awake and, for a moment, they will remember what it is to speak to the stones, to hold the earth as sacred, or to simply be lifted up by beauty, to be made better for the hour or day.

In being an artist and crafter, you are always taking parts of yourself and your world, putting them together in some new way and then, ultimately, if you're doing it right, giving them up. It's a really cool way to talk to the world, like putting a little message into a bottle and throwing it out to sea- I never know where it will inevitably end up, but I know I did something unique, something beautiful.

My boyfriend smiled and patted my knee. "Good, don't go getting all stoned on me."
We laughed. "I'm not," I said, "I mean, I won't."
"Good."

I didn't tell him that I was still seeing the living shimmer of the aventurine everywhere, even after blinking several times. It was in my head like some new glaze on reality. Probably just an optical illusion from staring for too long at one stone, I thought. I wouldn't want him to worry.