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.

my mindful year: january

Here we are in mid January and I am only just beginning to feel that I am uncurling from the cosy, reflective days of holiday. I have walked unusually slowly and quietly into this new year, with the notion of rest on my mind. Back in the busy-ness of Christmas eve night, I copied a few words into my journal from The Message (a modern language translation of the Bible), because the notion of 'unforced rhythms of grace' resonated so powerfully with me, as well as the idea of activity and work coming from a rested not anxious place. I knew I had to get pen to paper and record it.  I knew in that moment that this would be a key inspiration for me in 2016.

2015 had been good to me in very many ways but also, if I am honest, quite stressful as well - two kids doing important public exams (including applying for med school which is not for the faint-hearted!), our second son leaving home (he got into med school, hurrah!), hubby searching for a new job and various other issues that were to varying degrees quite difficult to work through. The last few days of the year seemed permeated with this idea of resting, trusting, laying down old fears and worries and walking 'freely and lightly'.  This is far easier to say than to do, or even understand how to do, so I have put in place a few things to make that idea of freedom more real and accessible. I have put aside time at the start of the day to do some stretching, yoga, and prayer - those things really help to start the day from a place of calm for me. 'Yoga with Adrienne' Youtube classes and yoga camp have been fantastic for establishing some kind of routine. I have also signed up for Sas Petherick's #mymindfulyear project - check out her website, I think it is going to be a brilliant way for me to become more intentional and clear sighted and less cluttered mentally. Imagine my surprise and general gobsmacked-ness when her first email proffered the concept of, yup, rest! What her insights have illuminated to me is that our energy on any given day is not infinite, just as breathing requires the in-breath and out-breath, so we need rest as well as activity, pause and imput as well as action and output. So this is the balance I am seeking this year, and there are many wonderful ways of finding it. For me, my faith, my noticing of beauty in simple things, early nights (need to work on that one!), walking and running, my making,  relaxing with a book or sketchpad, journal writing, yoga and quiet moments to myself with a cup of tea or glass of wine, are all ways to slow down and rest, to notice the present moment and how I am actually feeling. To breathe slow and long sometimes. To be properly present. The animal world is always really telling in this respect - think of the focus, power and achievements of a leopard or jaguar in full hunting mode, but also the langourous relaxation of a big cat draped over the branches of a tree - every muscle relaxed and stretched out in repose. We need both, but are so often needlessly afraid of what the need for rest says about us, and consequently glorify being busy. Not me any more, I think the potential to give value to rest is important not just for our own wellbeing, but because it has the potential to help us be far better human beings to those around us and have a clearer sense of what we are supposed to be doing with our lives in ways that can positively impact others, not just ourselves.

One way I have often found to be a short cut to a more restful and present mindset is walking - the more wild the place the better. Step by step, the mind re-calibrates priorities and focus. It is so underrated in western culture, but many indigenous people understood it well, the ability of landscape and our connection and veneration of it to ground our minds as well as exercise our bodies. There has been so much dank greyness this winter but the last few days have had some glorious sunshine and golden afternoons, so I have made the most of savouring each drop of winter sunshine, and noticed the achingly beautiful elements outside that even the short days of january can offer. These times offer so much in terms of mental rest and creative inspiration.

It is impossible for me not to think of new beginnings and fresh possibilities in January, and this has filtered down to my jewellery designs, where the idea of seeds in all their incredible potential for new life and energy alongside their willingness to rest and wait, has seemed just the right thing to be working on in this month. I started this collection a couple of years ago, making gold cowparsley seed pieces, but this month I have been looking at the seeds of my favourite garden plants and have created a new range of single stud earrings based on these lovely, minimalistic shapes. I hope you like the little slivers of silver as much as I do, and I am looking forward for making stone settings with them too. Shapes this simple need real attention to detail, so the shapes and finish have been carefully planned, a gorgeous sparkly brushed finish on the front and high shine on the edges and back for some textural contrast. Take a look here.

Just wondering if you have any fresh ideas as we start this new year, any ways to bring more rest and balance? I'd love to hear. x

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.

wabi sabi, seeds and gold

All summer long, I am transfixed by the beautiful flowers and grasses in the water meadows behind my house, but as autumn rolls by, it is the beautiful patches of woodland and, especially, the increasingly skeletal seedheads along the hedgerows and in the local meadows that catch my eye.

A few years ago,  I chose a photo of a seedhead of giant cowparsley as the logo for my business because I love the delicate umbel shape, the pretty, papery seeds ready to catch a breeze, the fact that the beauty is unrepentently caught up in its impermanence, fragility, simplicity.

This also seems to capture notions of wabi sabi - the Japanese idea that there is value and beauty in the natural, simple, impermanant. This philosophy is becoming more and more central to my life and my work - noticing the exquisite in the ordinary and simple, and embracing natural, organic conduits of inspiration and comfort is very instinctive to me but is also beginning to form an outlook and appreciation for life that feels very truthful and much more 'me' than more current Western pre-occupations with glamour, success, status and competitive perfectionism. In my making, this actually requires real focus and precision because if you are going to make something that celebrates natural textures and organic forms, with all their inherent little imperfections and simplicity, then they need to be very carefully considered to remain visually pleasing and intriguing. This is why design and making will always be a learning process, a honing and gathering together of skills, ideas and vision.

Crucially, there is a stillness at the heart of my understanding of wabi sabi's connection to creativity - and I definitely need this stillness in wild places to take time to really notice the beauty surrounding me, stillness in considering designs, stillness in the quiet, hopefully lovely pieces of jewellery that result. I don't want to make jewellery that shouts, competes, draws attention across a room, I want to create small, nature inspired pieces that speak of stillness, simplicity, beauty. It feels good to write it down, these thoughts have been swirling around my mind for months!

In the last fewe weeks, the small, oval seeds on the giant cowparsley have struck me as really lovely shapes to use in a new collection - so emphemeral and simple, yet because within them they hold the potential to create plants over seven foot high they are also symbolic of regeneration and hope. This aspect of seeds really appeals to me - their small ordinariness combined with their incredible potential and energy. I think seeds, seedheads and husks will be a rich seam of inspiration.

I am making some cowparsley seeds in silver and gold, and we will see how it goes! Autumn, seedheads, wabi sabi and gold - all swimming around in my mind and imagination, it makes sense to me, I hope it makes some sense to you?!

meadows of gold

For the last month or so, the water meadows behind our house have been in their high summer glory, all golden and  swaying, flowerheads and grasses catching the light in these lovely sunny days we have been having. Walks have slowed right down as I look, pick, photograph, sketch, I can't help it this time of year, it all looks so magical!

There are countless varieties of grasses; coarse and stiff varieties that hold their shape, pompoms, brushes and my favourite unfurling types that end up opening to reveal the softest, whispering fronds of light-catching fineness. Swoon.

I find it hard to think of plants more humble and overlooked, yet utterly magnificient, than the meadow grasses. There are wild flowers aplenty too of course, and the busily humming insects that feed on them. All sorts of knapweeds, mallows, clovers, buttercups, scabious and daisies to name a few, jostling amongst the grasses for sunlight and pollinators...

Such a beautiful time of year, it always rushes by too fast!

I have experimented over the years in trying to capture some of these shapes in my jewellery, but it is hard to do their energetic delicacy justice. I have longed to produce a meadow collection that is worthy of the title, and am wondering whether my debut fair trade gold collection this autumn/winter will be just the place to explore these beautiful forms? A golden meadow collection? Sounds good! I will be spending August working on these ideas in my sketch books, it feels just the right time. 

Let's play catch up 5: the jewellery

Well, it has been a hectic few months at Wild Acre jewellery. There was the WISE Creative pop-up boutique in Marylebone in the last week of May, joining JeDeCo jewellers and OXO building gallery (with the new designers launch in mid June), then my own Private View at home at the end of last month. Phew! Thanks so much to those who managed to come along to any of the above, it is always really lovely to see friendly faces at these events and meet online customers for the first time too, but thanks also to those who cheered me on from near and far, it means so much.

Wild Acre jewellery can now be found at the JeDeCo gallery, OXO tower wharf

new puddle of colour pendants at my Private View

In the middle of all that I finally got my licence to use Fair Trade, Fair Mined gold, which really was the most exciting development of all in terms of my central goal to make Wild Acre jewellery about more than just trying to create beautiful looking jewellery, I'm after beauty in the provenance too. Over the summer I am hoping to design a very small debut Fairtrade collection to launch at the end of the year - a bit of a dream come true if I can make it happen!

But much sooner than that, I have an invitation for you!  I am delighted to say that I have been invited to have my work at a joint showcase with some wonderful jewellers and a very clever handbag- designing lady, all at Craft Central, Clerkenwell, from 15th July to 18th July - I would be over the moon if you dropped by and said hello! :)

My new summer swift collection will be available plus the new puddle of colour pendants plus lots more - please come and have a look. x