15 @ 40 // day thirteen

As we run down to the last of the projects in this series, I find myself further and further in my archives. The obvious stuff has been done – I’ve baked cookies, I’ve sewn and quilted a bag, I’ve celebrated yarn crafts in various ways, there’s been a gnomish cameo. But among the big stuff, there’s the little, less visited ways I enjoy exploring creativity.

From the beginning, beading was on my list. Metal stamping was on my list also. As projects started filling slots, there was increasingly less space to put them in. Then, in one of my many deep dives into the archives of both the blog and the ‘gram, I came across a project I had made on commission for a friend back in 2015. From there I was down the rabbit hole, all the way back to a beaded keyring from 2009, and a quick stop in 2012, where I made a keyring-as-fanart. That fandom was a big part of my life in 2012/2013, getting me through some of the worst of my morning sickness with Beetle, and it was fun to have a way to reference that as part of this series. Many of the friends I made then I am still in touch with today.

The more I searched and planned, the more settled I became on the idea of a keyring. The original plan was to do something similar to that commissioned one. I pulled the box from storage, traipsing across to the container and back with the frost crunching under my feet. Digging through, I couldn’t find the glaze I could have sworn I’d seen in there. With a new bottle of resin procured, I returned to the box, pulling out boxes and picking through charms, specifically looking for the settings which once again, I could have sworn I have pulled out and packed up multiple times since moving.

Surprise surprise, they were not there either. What I did have, was a pile of metal blanks. I could easily replace the custom collage charms with a stamped charm, and like that, the project was underway. One of the last of my favourite pebble-style pewter charms, paired with some adorable bird stamps I’d bought to make earrings but never quite finished. A charm. A leftover knit-textured polymer clay shape, drilled and sanded but discarded in favour of the same shape in a larger size for my Nerdy Knitter costume. A little drop of beads, echoing that very first 2009 keyring, featuring leftover crystals from a bracelet, from our wedding, from my sacred stash of vintage childhood embroidery beads. A charm leftover from those first commissioned keyrings.

The crochet flowers, adorable as they are, are not mine – I purchased them another lifetime ago for my photography business, where they made a very cute backdrop for a cake smash when washi-taped to the studio wall. Since then, the seller has moved on, but kindly left a tutorial on instagram to be able to replicate them. The dish the keyring rests in comes from my very first pottery class.

Like the birds I stamped into pewter, it is a murmuration of different parts of my crafting life coming together.