Thank you for your interest in my art/jewelry! I have been working with my hands since I was a kid. I adopted a DIY attitude from my very crafty and artistically talented mother. Growing up, I saw her grow her small business painting intricate wooden Christmas decorations and jewelry from our garage.

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It was my mom who taught me how to wire wrap and over the years it's been very helpful with jewelry repairs and making all types of jewelry. But I knew that learning to solder would open up way more opportunities for jewelry design. I spent numerous hours watching youtube videos on soldering and kept my eyes open for an affordable class to take in my area because I was not willing to invest in the equipment until I had tried it, and I wanted solid instruction (supervision) before working with fire and chemicals. In the mean time, I sold beaded and wire wrapped jewelry, mostly to friends and acquaintances as a hobby. A couple of years later, I found the right soldering class to take and I was addicted... I knew I would be, and it wasn't as scary as I thought! Now I could make rings, bezels, my own jewelry components to mix with wire wrapped items, etc. Once I purchased all the equipment, *just* the bare minimum equipment and then the metal, I made the decision to step up my jewelry selling game in order to support the hobby in hopes of it becoming a sustainable business! Selling is definitely outside of my comfort zone, but I'm doing it!

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Over the past year I've slowly begun to purchase more, better tools and equipment. I've attempted many new techniques, made plenty of mistakes and triumphs, learned how to be more efficient with my time and materials and there are still plenty more things to try! 

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My favorite part about making jewelry is turning a raw material made by earth, like gemstones and silver, or pearls and shells made by a living creature, into something pretty you can wear everyday. Some of my favorite gems are stones are: moonstone, labradorite, pearls, sunrise shells, amazonite, fossils and garnet.  

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When it comes to my resin artwork, I had been exposed to resin decades ago as a surfer on a very minimal basis- fixing surfboard dings with solarez-which is a fast curing UV resin. I recently started making art with resin when exploring alternate trophy options for kids surf contests (read more on Surf Academy below). Instead of buying generic trophies that end up in landfills and usually aren't representative of our young surfers, we wanted to make things that kids would want to decorate their rooms with and maybe take with them to college. I created several different projects using resin including using and making molds over the past few years- they've all been a hit with the kids! For my wave inspired artwork- it took several months and I got a lot of valuable practice making over 50 trophies for this project. By the end, i thought some of my left overs and experimental artwork was good enough to add little by little to my markets and the wheels kept turning! Now, I'm continually looking for things that I can make resin waves on!  

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