Hobo Summer

As spring turns to summer and I get the van ready to go, again and again, out on the road- I imagine my summer to look a lot like this:



Check out my treasury here and show some love.

Choices, choices.

When I was little, I used to play this game to pass time: I'd open up a magazine and pretend that I could have one item from every page. Even if it was one of my dad's hunting magazines or my grandmother's cookbooks, I would grab the book or magazine and choose. If I didn't necessarily like the items, I chose anyway- challenging myself to think of ways to use it and to love it. I usually played this game sitting in the tub or on the toilet, but that's probably too much information. Today, I am playing this game as I sit with a family member who is sick and asleep. I will choose four random shops from Etsy and tell you what I would buy from them if I had won last night's lottery! The great thing about Etsy- it's not my dad's hunting magazine and I actually love all of these items.

So, the shops aren't COMPLETELY random. I am choosing them from the Top Treasury Team on Etsy. This is a great team to be apart of because it has a lot of activity, enthusiastic members, and a good leadership presence to keep the team organized and clean. Creating random, self promotional threads is not allowed in this team and this makes browsing through the forum very easy on the eyes. But, without further ado- what would I buy if I won last night's lottery?



Copper Bamboo Scarf by Happy Fortune.

I love this. I imagine wearing it with a tube top and jeans or a strapless gown of some kind of creme color so that all eyes would go straight to this piece. It would look like smoke had sexily wrapped itself around my neck and went with me to the party. It reminds me of T.S. Eliot's, "Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock," and how he describes the fog curling around the houses and falling asleep. It combines Victorian and futuristic in a very beautiful way.



And next, there is this:

Nautical Shell Pendant by Dream of a Dream

I am so enchanted with everything and anything from the deep, dark sea and I especially love pieces of art that turn natural history into beautiful, wearable art. Many people find creepy crawly swimming things to be a bit unnerving, but these people are quickly won over when those creepy crawlers are rendered elegant and shiny in silver and bronze. For those of us who find natural history to be everything but creepy, we can tastefully nerd out with gorgeous pieces like this. Also, although I am not sure of the technique this artist used- lost wax casting, metal clay, etc- I love the rustic, hand-made look of it.




Grey Ribbon Necklace by More than a Ribbon

Like this seller's shop name says, this necklace and everything else in her store is so much more than just a ribbon, but who ever thought you could do this with ribbons? I love jewelry that challenges norms by utilizing new and unique elements. These innovate ways of incorporating fabric and other affordable foundations are not only chic and beautiful, they are a great way to create jewelry in a time when silver and gold prices are skyrocketing. I love the repetition in this design and the color choices. I love it that people will take a second and maybe even a third look to say, wait, what IS that made of? I hope pieces like this will continue to challenge the way we have assigned insane values to things like silver and gold while more renewable and less expensive resources go unnoticed.



Loaded Charm Bracelet by Vintage Valley Girl

Finally, this rocks! I once called my generation, "The Junk Drawer Generation," because I love the way we honor and repurpose old things. When generations before us might have found their grandmother's costume and vintage jewelry boxes only to send them off to the thrift store, we find amazing ways to give them a new and modern meaning. I also love things in overabundance. I love shelves spilling over in dusty thrift stores. I love altars full of candles and offerings in old churches. I love walking through attics and hallways to see curio cabinets holding eclectic collections of old older people who spent lifetimes cherishing their trinkets. I love bold and chunky jewelry that demands attention. I also love it that this piece satisfies the still present little girl inside of me who loved to take every single piece of her mother's jewelry and put it on her body to pose in front of a mirror and feel sparkly and beautiful.

So, have some time to kill today? Don't have the time, but want to kill it anyway? Play the choices, choices game and pick some random shops and choose one thing you would buy and add it to your favorites. It's fun to pretend.

Why Handmade?

When I first imagined this blog, I wanted to write the most poignant, beautiful piece about why buying handmade is so important, so radical, and so much fun! Now, I realize that there are so many reasons to buy handmade that I could not possibly condense them all into one entry. So, I will make a series and that series shall be called "Why Handmade?" It shall answer so many questions so perfectly so as to forever alter the way you shop. Or, it will just reinforce your already awesome buying habits and give me something to do. Or most people will continue to buy mass produced crap and the machines will roll on. I'm not fooling myself here, but I believe that mind by mind, hand sewn stitch by stitch, this world will, sooner or later, change for the better. I truly hope so, because, somehow, we have gotten so far from ourselves, it is frightening. We have gone from individual hands reaching up in awe and reverence to paint the insides of ancient caves to the dehumanizing, mind-killing repetition and robotics of modern sweat shop factories. Before we get carried off into fantasies of a new world where all people are reconnected with the precious work of their hands and the fruits of their labors and before we get pulled down into nightmares of a future where factories are the lengths of "16 football fields" and have "6 miles of conveyer belts," (but wait, that is already happening,) let's define our new term:

Mass Produced Crap:



If that picture doesn't scare you, I don't know what will. The inhumanity of it is so striking that it looks like some science fiction novel's worst possible premonition of humanity's future, but it is real and it is now. Factories like this one exist all over the world and I don't even need to tell you about the workers' rights violations and environmental degradations that these kinds of operations are famous for. Let's take this critique to a simpler, less obvious place: what happens to us as people when we are no longer connected to the things we own, when we don't know them from start to finish, when they no longer tell us a story?

A few days ago a friend asked me to think about what I would try to rescue from my apartment if it were on fire. I thought about it while cleaning my bedroom and, looking around, I realized with satisfaction and some sadness that I would only care about saving the things that have stories connected to them that tell the history of my life and most of these things are of little value according to the dominant culture's idea of worth. Of course, if I had children or if the neighbor's cat was sleeping over, I would rescue all of them first, but on any normal night, I would grab the seashells, the stained glass votive candle dish a now dead friend had made for me years ago, my hand bound diaries, a necklace my grandmother made. I would save those things and my life and I would not think twice about the electronics.

In this great piece, blogger and journalist Sarah Wilson discusses how getting our hands dirty is an important technique for human happiness. She reminisces about the magical times in childhood when sitting with her brothers to clean their bikes with rags and toothbrushes was a deeply satisfying ritual. Do you remember those times? She tells us that social scientists have now called this phenomenon of feeling satisfied with the work of one's own hands, "The Ikea Effect." I guess it is called that because people who shop at Ikea feel a sense of satisfaction not experienced with other furniture purchases because they have to take it home and assemble it themselves and this gives them a similar feeling of actually having made it themselves. I personally think it is quite sad that a fundamental part of our humanity that has been with us since the dawn of consciousness has been named after a corporation that mass produces cheap items, utilizes sweatshops, and has done everything in its power to keep dissatisfied workers from unionizing, but, hey, at least people are talking about the fact that using our hands makes us happier.

In short, buying handmade is putting the humanity back into arts and crafts and just about everything else. It is knowing that what you give as a gift or take into your home was made with care, love, and attention by individual hands putting their soul into every detail, not selling their soul to machines just to survive. It means saying yes to a world where people are once again reconnected with the magic of making things themselves and the power of stories to give us our reasons for being. It means, in the very least, buying something that is made to last a lifetime, not one wash cycle.

I didn't tell you all the reasons to buy handmade, but this was a good start. I wasn't the Sarah Connor of crafts (yet!), but I offer you this beautiful video I found when searching for "women making crafts." See the smiles, the colors, the hands, the babies, and the stories? That's what I want to support and make more of in this increasingly mechanical, dehumanizing, and disembodied world. What about you?

Women outside making crafts from James Ryerson on Vimeo.

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.