I’ve always loved colors and textures and shapes.

When I was younger, my sewing gave me pleasure not only because it allowed me to make new clothes, but because I got to pick patterns and then choose fabrics and colors that suited each pattern.  I also made doll clothes for my younger sister, and then I could play with fabric scraps from velvets and satins as well as cottons, making a dress that I designed for her doll.  I loved going to fabric stores and searching through materials — especially scraps from fabrics that weren’t practical for anything for me to wear; I could always play with them as I made doll clothes for my sister’s Barbie.

If you looked through the thousands of photographs I’ve taken over the years, you’d notice that many of them highlight shapes and colors.  There are photographs of doorways that show hidden gardens, lush with greenery and flowers, or that open to ruins — with  wooden doors worn, paint peeling.  I’ll stop anytime I’m walking around a city (say London, or Athens, or Florence, or Galveston) and snap a picture of some view that catches my eye.  Now that we’ve got cameras built into phones, as well as digital cameras, there’s no processing fee to print from film, and my finger hits the shutter a lot.

I might get fascinated by the way light hits on a plant, or a cat, or water.  Or by the lines I perceive, the shapes that emerge as I look.  Colors pull me in as well.

Born in July, perhaps I was destined to love water (Cancer IS a water sign, after all), and I can spend hours looking at water, listening to tides and wind, observing how colors begin near the shore and change, shift as waters deepen.  I’m not quite able to catch those subtle shifts in watercolors (though I try), but the colors stay with me.

And that’s where so much of my inspiration emerges as I grow in my jewelry designs and in my crafting skills.

Homer’s “wine-dark sea” really isn’t one color, but a banding of blues, greens, violets — many shades of each.

Gemstones and minerals are from the same source as the water or the flowers or the trees and plants I photograph — nature.  Who could imagine that a single stone could reflect the minerals in the earth where it was born?  And that no two stones are ever exactly alike?

I recently returned from a trip to Nevada, and I always visit Virginia City specifically to visit two rock shops — great prices, amazing stones.  Turquoise (from the Kingman mine in Arizona), dendridic limestone, chrysocolla, moss agate so translucent that the mossy green seems to float, rutilated tourmaline in quartz, and peatbog (an opalized stone from some plant matter) — who could NOT be fascinated by these miracles of design and color?  (Lapidary artists, too, have much to do with the finishing of what might look like a lump of nothing.)

Sometimes I know I need a certain shape or size of a particular stone for something (a 5 mm round bead of garnet, say, for an earring), but often the design begins with a stone — the color/colors, the shape of the stone itself, and the patterns that have emerged in it.

I’m learning to sketch what I “see” in my imagination — and keeping a notebook specifically for that.

I’m now working on straightening and reorganizing my craft room, I find that as my skills have grown, my craft room organization has shifted as well.  It’s an ongoing struggle to find a method that works.

But when I grab a container labeled “Virginia City” or “Pakistan,” I already see specific stones and start to imagine designs.