I've been making things again

Well, here we go. I've been making things again.

Things that celebrate. Things that remember. Things that mark something. Things that say I love you. Things that make you say, yes, that.

Things that mean things.

After twenty-five years of Waxing Poetic I really thought I was finished, and for a while, maybe I was. I'd made one thing for a long time and I'd made a lot of it, and when it ended I was tired in the way you can only get from something you loved. I put my tools away. I read. I planted more starts than the soil could handle. I filled my “well.”

And then I missed it. Not the business, because while I loved it, I'd had enough of it. My gut instinct to make something different came from paying attention to our times… the downturn of brick-and-mortar, the barrage of fast and cheap.

What I missed was the antidote: the bench and the simplicity of making one beautiful object at a time. The pencil moved before I knew what it was drawing. A piece of wax turning into a piece of silver turning into a thing somebody would keep in a drawer for forty years and take out on the bad days. It's how I started, and what I am returning to. That feeling that a person could hold something I'd made and feel known. And that that knowingness could move through hands and generations and remind us of who we are, and that our lives are built by our choices.

So I started again.

I'm calling this new beginning Cœura. It sounds like courage. The name comes from cœur, the French for heart, and the little œ in the middle is two letters held as one, which turned out to be the whole idea before I knew it was the idea.

Cœura is a studio for personal objects. Not a jewelry brand… I've done that, and this is something else. Nothing here exists until you ask for it. You begin a piece, you tell us what it should carry — a name, a date, an inside joke, the night something happened, the two letters of two people — and then it's made, once, for you, by the same smiths in Bali I've created with for most of my working life. We call that a commission. It's an old word and it's the right one.

I don't know yet everything that Cœura will be. I just know what it's for. It's for the moment when a truth lands and you need something to hold it.

That's what I'm making now. I'm glad you're here.

You're the Artist. We're your atelier.

Xx, Patti