We've ordered some beautiful laces from another great Ebayer roseentrps and I'm very happy with their quality.  I've been working with a local Houston watercolorist for the past two years learning hand painting techniques for silks and other textiles in the hopes that I could apply them in jewelry creation.  I'm so pleased that those hopes have been realized.

The above image is only the beginning of the pieces that will be completed.  I will be embroidering crystals, gemstones and chain on the lace to create the finished pieces that will have a very romantic and feminine feel.  Some of them, like the above piece, will be more gothic in tone and others will have a lighter theme.  I hope to have them finished for next Sunday's auction time.  If you'd like to be notified, please subscribe to the store's newsletters.  :)

Whenever I work on a piece, I begin by picturing a woman wearing it. Who, where and when is she? How does she perceive herself in the world? In my mind’s eye, she is always doing something that she loves. She is unafraid. I know that this is just my imagination, of course.

As much as I’d like to believe that my art will always be in the presence of a woman in that state of being, the reality of our lives is much more complex and, perhaps inevitably, more difficult. Women are constantly struggling between an honest desire to be beautiful, and the pressures to look appealing no matter the cost.

Looks alone have nothing to do with the character of an individual, and yet women receive the message every day that their appearance — particularly in respect to their sexual appeal — is the guiding principle upon which all other aspects of her will be judged. Nevertheless, aesthetics in all their subjectivity do not in themselves make the world better. As an artist, this was difficult to admit.

Our culture continues to perpetuate the fallacy that physical appeal — often misnamed beauty — is worthy of any cost, no matter how gruesome; indeed, the phrase “there is no beauty without suffering” is the mantra of many women as they kick off their high heels. There seems at times to be an almost primal desire for this paradigm; for some, the idea that blood was shed in the pursuit of this so-called beauty makes it that much more precious and attractive.

I’ve spoken to several people about conflict stones, and offered an alternative. There are man-made diamonds that have even more sparkle and less flaw than natural diamonds, cost a fraction of the price of mined stones, and best of all, are guaranteed to be bloodless. In many cases, disappointingly, I was assured that such a thing would be less appealing than a “real” diamond, never mind that molecularly the two stones are so similar that their slight variations (largely due to the synthetic diamond’s perfection) are indistinguishable except under specific high-tech laboratory tests.

If both stones offer the same aesthetics, and one kind is known to be connected to conflict and death, while the other is certain to be free of it, it seems to me that the more beautiful option would be the one that has the least ugliness associated with it. However, many people continue to feel that suffering is related to beauty.

On balance, a diamond set in jewelry has no use other than to look appealing. Its perceived value lay in its rarity, which is clearly demonstrated by the suffering that accompanies much of the diamond trade. After all, if it weren’t so rare a thing, people wouldn’t need to die for it, making their suffering a kind of macabre proof of concept. This, however, cannot be called a beautiful thing. To be beautiful, something must add to the world, not destroy it. To me, it makes such jewelry ugly, because the choices that made its existence possible involve the darkest aspects of our most un-evolved selves.

This is not to say that all jewelry must itself be imbued with a social usefulness in order to be desired. Even though our studio’s auctions attempt to create that connection, it is still the acts of the artists who volunteer their work and people who bid that make that connection real. The jewelry itself is not inherently that useful. Just so, it is in the positive choices that a woman makes every day that creates beauty in her life. It is such a woman who I picture wearing my art, lending her beauty to it.