Most of the time when I finish a piece of jewellery or beadwork, I know it is destined for that plastic storage box in the top of the wardrobe. I love working with tiny beads but I just have so much trouble making the type of jewellery that I really want to wear. I don’t like all the frou frou frilliness that seems to come with a lot of seed beadery, but I am the most hopeless stringer around. Putting pretty beads on thread in an aethetically pleasing manner takes a surprising amount of skill, and it is a skill that I simply don’t have. To top it all off, I’m fairly boring when it comes to clothing and accessories. If I can’t jump a fence in it or if it needs much more care and attention than my birthday suit, I’m not really going to feel comfortable wearing it around.
To me, the highest compliment I can pay to someone is to tell them that I would wear their work. It took me some time to come to the conclusion that wearability is an incredibly important thing to aim for when it comes to handcrafted jewellery and art jewellery. It took me much longer to feel comfortable with the fact that I am much more attracted to pieces that I can see myself in, even though I adore really jaw-dropping and elaborate pieces that someone has poured hours of time and skill into. It is taking me even more time to be entirely at home voicing my opinions on what I like and why I like it.
Thinking about it, this goes some way towards explaining my desire for good technical skill. Pieces with more “white space” (whatever that translates to in jewellery speak, not negative space but more a lack of complexity) need to show far more technical skill than pieces that are bursting with visual details because that precision and craftsmanship becomes part of the overall design. A single wrapped loop is going to get far more attention than the oodles of wrapped loops you might find on a more flamboyant cha-cha style piece. This is not to say that I don’t look for technical skill in visually complicated pieces, I do, it is just that normally I see other aspects of the overall design first. With simpler pieces, there is little else to hold the eye so the technical imperfections tend to leap out more.
So here is my challenge to myself. I need to enjoy the physical construction process of making a piece, but I also want everything I make to be something I would potentially wear. I want to seed bead simplicity. Anyone who has seen a lot of seed bead work knows that this is not an easy task. You run the risk of work looking under-nourished, completely out of balance, or just plain boring. I want to find that sweet spot between challenging to construct and unchallenging to wear. It has got to be in there somewhere, I just haven’t quite found it yet.
My thanks to Ayuumi for providing access to such lovely photos on Flickr
That top piece is Gorgeous! I would definitely wear that!! (The others are very pretty too, but the top piece I could see myself buying.)