new Wild Acre jewellery and website

It has been a wonderful, happily chaotic, family oriented summer, which means my little space here has been sadly neglected! However, lots has been happening, the website has had a pretty, wee overhaul and there are some new jewellery designs made and still in the pipe-line of my imagination!

I am so excited about this Fairtrade gold ring, a design created earlier this year, it is curvacious, minimalistic and the lines are flowing and organic. It was inspired by the the river at the bottom of the garden and I love everything about its visual simplicity and fluidity. Most of all I love that the gold is mined and sold with utter transparency and fairness, it is part of a social enterprise that is literally changing lives of miners and their families for the better. It would be a beautiful, alternative wedding band for a man or a woman I think?

It is also available in 100% recycled gold and silver. It will in my webshop from next week, but I thought I would give you a heads-up here!

Please do pop over to the website if you haven't been for a while, I hope you love what you find, any feedback most welcome. There are still a few things to add, including a testimonial page, so if you have a piece of Wild Acre jewellery that you love and would be happy to provide a testimonial I would be super grateful if you could email me a few words? Thank you. :)

Meanwhile, if you are in the UK, enjoy this incredible summery weather and have a lovely rest of the week.

Nature notes and My Mindful Year: february

I am really relishing my notebooks! The whole process of walking, noticing, taking photos and recording nature in some form. I am doubling up my nature notes and my mindful year posts today not just because, ahem, I have run out of February days, (where has the month gone?), but because the word for february in Sas Petherick's My Mindful Year project has been connection, and the nature sketching and journaling has really been a part of my exploration of what connection means for me.

Connection works on so many levels doesn't it? For me, connection with people I love and/or respect, connection with my home and garden, with my work, with the natural world around me, with the God I believe in, these are fundamental to my happiness and wellbeing, but so often the connection gets a bit lost and frayed by the busyness and demands of normal life. Just as our bodies require sustenance, so does this need to connect with the things that are important to us. Deepening healthy connections requires time, energy, intention - margin outside of the to-do list in order to feed the soul a bit, keep it nourished and connected, no? I certainly find that it doesn't happen all by itself. It is not so much that we have to contrive and construct connections, but we do need to create time, space and opportunity for connection to happen naturally and flourish, I think? So for me, having set aside time to walk, notebook and camera in hand, is a way of slowing down and letting myself have the opportunity to be inspired. Last month's noticing and recording of the alder trees and their beautiful cones has resulted this month in the birth of a new little collection - it would never have happened without that time spent wandering and gathering, sketching and thinking.

I have even started walking with a jewellery buddy, Liz Willis, with the express intention of enjoying, discussing and exploring the notion of being inspired by place and found objects. We live near each other and have already had a few walks criss crossing our local landscape, open to whatever inspires us on the day, and taking some of that back to inform our designing back in our studios.

This month, it has been the curious juxtaposition of the brittle, bleached remains of last years wild plants and seedpods with the bright green new growth just beginning to shoot up, which has caught my eye. I am wanting to make a new collection of brooches and the fragments of ash tree keys, poppy seed heads, achillea and eryngium stalks and husks have given me more than enough inspiration!

I have also been thinking about how I connect with the people I care about, and how to make more time for them. Keeping in contact with my boys at uni and the ways I do that, one on one time with my two who are still at home. Time aside for just me and my mister.  The notion of connection has created so many questions in my mind, and it is March tomorrow, so I think it will take more than the short month of february to answer them all, but that is kind of the point isn't it?

Have you got any thoughts on connection, and how to help foster the right sort of connections that lead to a happier and more fulfilling way of life? I guess disconnecting from what no longer works for us, or even harms us is also key, but that would need another whole blogpost! x

nature notes: january

I have always been a nature nut, a confirmed tree-hugger and unrepentant sunset-chaser, a kid with a pocket full of pebbles and acorns, and a grown woman with the same.

It is no wonder my blog has always been chocca with images and musings on nature, and that my business is called Wild Acre and my designs inspired by the natural world around me. It is absolutely who I am, and how my heart beats.

This year, I have sectioned up my sketchbooks into months, like little chapters, and will be filling them up with notes and drawings of the things I find on my wanders down by the river or in the woods, partly to help me look that much closer and see the months more clearly from a botanical viewpoint, but mainly just for the joy of it and for bringing a bit more mindfulness into my year. So once a month I will blog here from my nature notes, sharing things I have found and why I love them or simply what they are. On instagram, I will be collating these images together using the hashtag #naturenotes_january and simply adding the new month as we go along (naturenotes_february and so on). Please do join in over there adding the hashtag to any images you have of seasonal interest, sharing little details of nature that have caught your eye with photos, drawings or words. Hopefully a lovely treasure trove of seasonal loveliness and knowledge will build up over the months. If you like this sort of thing there are tons of other IG accounts and hashtags that explore similar  nature-inspired themes - see the exquisite drawings of laragastiger, vanillalemoncake 's nature inspired creativity, rockandfern 's inspiring collections, harryandfrank 's gorgeous photographs, modernbotanic 's thoughtful, nature inspired prints, hannahnunnlamps for beautiful botanic inspired designs, _emmabradshaw 's inspirational #thenaturetable and silverpebble2 's knowlegeable and creative account.

I am adding a little extra geekery to my nature notes by joining in with The Woodland Trust's nature calendar survey, where your observations and notes can join thousands of others to create scientifically useful data for researching the effects of climatic changes. What is not to like?

The weather until very recently has been so weirdly warm that nature feels a bit out of kilter in my garden and local countryside - hellebores have been out for weeks, and the snowdrop drifts are bulking up and flowering already. Delphinium shoots are a foot high and daffs and tulips are popping their green shoots above the soil, all a bit strange!

On my wanderings, it is the gorgeous little alder cones that have caught my eye, last year's female catkins apparantly, but just so intriguing and curious-looking hanging in their thousands from the branches of the magnificent alders along our local riverbanks. Did you know alder wood is very resistant to rot and often grows close to water - historically used for ship building and clog making? I had no idea, and as a devotee of clogs since childhood am even more smitten! I couldn't resist a few sketches and am imagining them hanging in silver or gold on lovely long pendants? Mmmmm! I have also fallen hard for this lovely wild plant I found growing in abundance along a footpath (also sketched below) - anyone any ideas of what it is, I would love to know, it is so pretty?

So, that is my nature notes entry for January, a very simple start I know, but I hope you enjoy the series and join in with some of your own discoveries over on instagram or below in the comments. Have a cosy winter weekend. xx

Thoughts on finding a 'maker's voice'

When you make jewellery, in my case usually inspired by the natural forms and textures I find in my garden or the nature reserve on my doorstep, you find yourself in the often uncomfortable position of reworking shapes and objects like leaves and pebbles that thousands of other jewellers are also exploring in their own way. Hopefully as one's skills and vision grow, one begins to find a sort of 'maker's voice', a recognisable style and direction of one's own which slowly becomes signature. Over the Christmas break, I will continue to look through my collections and keep distilling them down to the key pieces which seem to best voice my personal view and love of botanical forms, those which have resulted from the most direct interactions and explorations of my local landscape, from my own sketches, photographs, flower pressing and so on.

Even with my more generic pieces like my stacking rings or dish set rings, there are many design choices I have made in order to keep my pieces inherently different and my own. For example, every dish set ring I make, whilst being a very common mount shape, is made using entirely unique- to-me ring shanks. For years, instead of using regular wire to make these rings, I use bands I originally carved out of wax - a skinny one, a bark textured one and a wide one, all with flat profiles to make stacking easier.

Every single dish set or stacking ring (apart from really big ones which very occasionally need to be made with wire formed to match) is made using one of these three unique bands. Each one has little irregularities of shape and texture that make them different and entirely 'Wild Acre'. I have always polished my pieces myself, with shiny or brushed finishes or some more rustic finishes using my own customised tools.

Tomorrow, I am pootling off to my local art suppliers and getting myself a new and lovely big sketchbook for 2016 - not just for drawing in, but as in my sketchbooks of previous years, for sticking in gorgeous meadowgrasses, hedgerow flowers and scraps of lichen and other lovely finds to inspire my work. This is where my focus is going to be this coming year, on the meadowy, watery landscape I am so lucky to live in and the small botanical wonders I find there. Seed heads, acorns, summer grasses - these sort of things may not be the most original of inspirations but they are the things I love, that I am surrounded by and which seem to call my name, so I am giving my creative energy to voicing with confidence the beauty I find here. Less worry about what others think, more focus on practising my drawing, photo taking and silversmith skills, more experimentation and play, so that voice can sing a bit more freely and less fearfully.

The year is drawing to a close after a fantastic few weeks of fairs and events and am so grateful for every customer, new and old, for every conversation about what I am trying to do, and for the lovely enthusiasm and support I have found - thank you so much to everyone who has supported my small business this year, I am so thankful. My webshop is shutting for a couple of weeks from this friday 18th December, but I look forward to re-opening in January, hopefully rested and rejuvenated and ready for the new year with new ideas and dreams beginning to bubble away! Wishing everyone a wonderful Christmas. xxx

hedgerows in winter

For the last fifteen years, ever since we moved into our barn which is in the middle of open fields and on the edge of a water meadow, I have daily walked the footpaths of the local landscape. These paths and bridleways along the riverbanks and field margins are usually marked by miles of native hedgerows, many dating from the 18th century enclosures but others much more ancient. As I walk my attention is always piqued by the tangle of living branches, and the life that teems within them. As the seasons come and go, I find it impossible not to be moved and creatively inspired by the beautiful annual rhythm, dance almost, of hedgerow buds, leaves, flowers, haws and hips and the flurry of birds, animals and insects that rely on them. There are many blog posts in the archives here celebrating the springtime explosion of blackthorn and hawthorn flowers in the local hedgerows, and also the frothy ribbons of cowparsley that fringe all the footpaths here. Every year there seems to be something else to notice and be inspired by, and every year I take photographs, make sketches, write words and poems and finally base new collections of jewellery on designs directly inspired by what I have discovered. The hawthorn collection and lichen and blackthorn cuffs and twiggy rings are all direct results of these observations and sense of finding beauty in the simplest of places.

Right now the hedgerows are in their somber, winter clothes, long gone are the flowers and leaves, and only a handful of haws and hips hold on against the wind and hungry birds. Sinuous miles of twiggy native species, lean hard against the cold winds together, bare and sparse and pared back to the hard, brown bone. There is something unflinching and stoic about their nakedness, something that seems to remind me that rest and resilience are an important counterpoint to growth and busy activity. In our hedgerows, trees grow out and up regularly but still unexpectedly, (once many elms did, but now mainly other natives have taken their place).

It is at twilight that they seem at their most majestic, the old lores of magicke and myth seem most believable as the low winter sun sets like low slung fire between their twisted branches.

In every season my local landscape holds so many wonders that stop me in my tracks.  The winter can seem monochromatic and terse compared to the colourful, flowery ebullience of the warmer months, and this is an especially stark contrast in the hedgerows.  Yet, so much beauty still lurks in the patterns and textures that remain, and there is a profound sense of mystery and resolute, weather-defying courage which is only amplified by the lack of colour and foliage. The earth is not just resting but is gathering its strength and power for the spring to follow. A breathing out, a gathering in. The prettiness may have seeped away with the autumn rains, but a different, more questioning gorgeousness remains.

autumn inspirations

Autumn is such a rich time for inspiration for Wild Acre jewellery. So many of the natural materials that inspire me are in evidence in my garden, the fields, hedgerows and water meadows. Autumn leaves, seeds and seedpods, acorns and pinecones, lichen and late season flowers - so many lovely patterns, shapes and textures. In the garden the very last of the blooms, dahlias, asters, pincushion flowers and anemones still flowering bravely on...

Although today is rainy and grey, we have had some gorgeous sunshine and, as always, I have loved the chance to take to the footpaths and bridleways around my home and watch the trees slowly change colour, the meadowgrasses swell with seed and of course pick basketfuls of blackberries!

Lots of my jewellery is directly influenced by the fruits, leaves and seedpods I see on these walks, things I pick up, pop in my pocket, photograph and sketch. There are little worlds of detail and texture in these small fragments of nature, they are rich pickings for a designer maker! I like the play between the impermanence of the individual items I collect - the way they slowly fall apart, dry out or decay - and the more permanent record of them I make in metal. And yet if I had left them in place, their decay would have brought forth new growth in its season, so the play between transience and intransience is curious and open ended. There is a sense of wabi sabi about these processes of discovery and creation, a sense of wonder in the simplest of materials, the beauty found by looking closely and taking time, the necessity of decay and the pull between of permanence and impermanance.

This autumn there is something about the curving lines of seedpods, and the precious cargo of new life and potential that they contain that is catching my eye and piquing my interest and creativity. These giant cowparsley seeds form part of a range of seed inspired pieces that have been brewing in my imagination for a while.

I am also creating more pieces in my fallen pod range, new stones and new forms.

So this is a busy, happy time at the Wild Acre jewellery bench where I am really going back to the basis of what I love - looking closely at the nature outside my doorstep and finding ways to explore and celebrate what I find in sustainable precious metals. I have updated my webshop recently, if you fancy a gander, click HERE.