Working on the road...

A few days ago, Russ and I celebrated eight months on the road. Wow... eight months of continuous travel! We made it through one of the coldest and wettest winters on record... and now it's spring here in Texas. Flowers are blooming, everything is bright green... it's an incredibly beautiful change from the months of cold, dry desert.


The more we travel, the more I think about how to work on the road. Like everything else, I have had to completely re-conceive of what it means to work on jewelry while we're traveling. Yet, unlike figuring out how to cook, navigate, set up camp, stay warm, etc., setting up my studio and creating new pieces has been a real challenge for me.

For so long, I've worked in sets... simultaneously creating several pieces at once. When you have a studio and can leave things spread out, it's a great way to work, because you can fit bits of work into random chunks of time, and you can knock out all the sanding (for example) at one time (not to mention, the more you stare at something, the more you can refine the design). As we travel, however, I don't have the freedom to just leave things laying around. And my brain, in all honesty, isn't adapting so well to this. Which is why I've been ever-so-slowly working on the same ten pieces for the past three months. Yes, three months.

Now, to be fair, I have worked on other projects during this time. For example, these custom head badges for a bicycle frame builder in the Sacramento area...


My goal is to finish up these ten pendants before we push out of Austin, and get them listed in my shop. These are all pieces that are inspired by our desert crossing... the brown hills, the skies full of stars, the bright red and orange desert plants. And now that we're not in the desert, I want to wrap them up and start looking at all the trees and fresh spring greens for new inspiration. I've made it my mission for the next few days, so I'm actually making a fair bit of progress. Take a look...


And, then, I'm making a radical change in how I work on jewelry. This sort of came to me the other night as I was going to sleep... and I think it'll help me focus better on each piece and not feel so overwhelmed. My plan is to work on and complete one piece, inspired by our travels, per month. If I get that one piece finished up before the end of the month and want to move on to a second piece, great! But, I'm going to finish that one piece first.

And I want to push myself to document the creation of these pieces... where I found the inspiration, what I'm incorporating, the various stages of making each piece, all the back-stories. I'm really excited about this new challenge, and I hope you'll follow along.

But, first, I gotta finish up these desert pieces...