I am now back in Sydney and am partially recovered from my visit to Adelaide, other than a cough and the sniffles. I seem to get ill every time I go there these days! But at least this time I didn’t see a repeat of the Being Rushed to Hospital and Put on a Drip event of last Christmas. The place is deadly, I tell you!

Fortunately I felt up to spending some time at my bench over the weekend and completed a respectable batch of jewellery to send to two shops on consignment, along with a little bit of work for my Etsy shop and a mound of components to help see me through to Christmas.

When I’m doing that sort of making I find my mind always wanders - often to somewhere quite interesting.

On the weekend I kept thinking about the fact that at Adelaide airport while standing in a (ridiculously long) queue there was a woman in front of me who I’m almost positive was wearing one of my pieces of jewellery. It was a very simple sterling silver chain made up of round, hammer-beaten loops - exactly the same as a chain I used to make and sell a few years ago and it even featured the same sort of clasp.

The thing that particularly stood out about this chain - and made me wonder if it was one of mine - was the fact that even from half a metre away it looked handmade.

This is a more recent incarnation of the same sort of chain that the woman in Adelaide was wearing - it has bigger loops and a rougher finish. And it’s mine! I wear this piece of jewellery far more often than any other piece I own.

So as I worked on the weekend I started to ponder the nature of handmade objects - and the fact that more and more I like my work to look like it’s handmade rather than something perfect and polished.

Once upon a time perfection would have been the aim of every jewellery maker - just to be able to polish a piece of metal so that you could see your reflection in it must have been breathtakingly impressive, let alone to be able to form it into something useful or wearable - and seamlessly so.

These days it’s relatively trivial for mass manufacturers to make perfectly polished, seamless work - it’s just not that special anymore. Purchased lengths of chain, for instance, always look perfect - and they always look, to my eye at least, very much manufactured.

Anyone who’s done it will know that chain making by hand - of even the simplest chains - is a particularly laborious task. It’s a real labour of love. That alone makes a handmade chain very special to my mind.

I now embrace the idea that anyone who sees a chain that I’ve made can probably tell straight away that it’s been handmade - and this is now the case with a large amount of my jewellery. I used to try to avoid this and aimed for perfect finishes and invisible solder joins, but now for much (although not all) of my work I actually emphasise some of these ‘flaws’ and draw attention to the fact that I’ve handmade each piece.

These days you can see many of my solder joins, there are marks from my hammer (I love using my old and very much non-polished hammer for the marks it makes!), I often like to leave a roughly sanded finish, there might be the odd file mark, I handmake my ear wires without a jig and each one is very slightly different, etc..

I was wondering whether people who buy my work notice this - I even wondered if some might think I’m being slack!

Or perhaps there are those who really do enjoy it along the lines of the Japanese wabi sabi notion that imperfection is at the heart of beauty, something I really have consciously started to embrace more in my work in the last couple of years.

Of course wabi sabi is also about impermanence - I struggle a bit with that aspect, I confess - I want my objects to live on forever! And metal is a very permanent-seeming thing - until it’s melted down, of course.

So those were my weekend ponderings as I slaved away on my work!