Advice from a Dragonfly

Zoom in on your dreams.

For some reason, I have always loved dragonflies.  I can't explain it, but when I see something depicting one, I have to bring it home.  I have wrapped wire dragonflies on one bathroom wall and a dragonfly themed tooth brush holder in another, a candle holder and small plate in the kitchen, hooks for our car keys in the front hall.  My jewelry box holds a pair of earrings, three necklaces, a bracelet, and anklet.  There's a dragonfly on one of my t-shirts and a gorgeous pin on my winter coat (thanks Mom and Dad!).  There are more scattered about, but you get the picture.

Ironically, now that I'm making jewelry aimed at encouraging young girls to dream and succeed, I've finally looked up the symbolism of the dragonfly and found that it represents strength, self-realization, happiness, transformation, peace, harmony and living in the moment.  Basically everything I'm trying to teach my children and, by extension through my jewelry, every girl out there I can reach.

All of which boils down to the fact that I can now justify putting dragonflies on my jewelry.  Yay!

So I just got my fancy-schmancy new dragonfly stamp (thanks so much to The Urban Beader...they have an amazing selection of stamps and it was hard to control myself!).  Now I'm on a tear, stamping this bad boy everywhere I can.  Here are a few pieces in progress that will be hitting the Etsy shop soon.  Heck, I'm so in love with this thing I'm considering having an entire dragonfly-themed section in the shop.  What do you think?

I'm planning on a leather cord for at least one of them, maybe a crystal or pearl dangle on the "dream" one?  The other charm is convex so I doubt one would lay well against it but I can try.  And I have to say that the "Brave/Strong" one was designed by Big...she got hold of my design notebook one day and this is what I found -

I made a couple of changes, as you can see, but overall the idea was hers and I love it.  Could it be that I'm running a future mother/daughter business?  As long as we avoid glue sticks and/or trifold boards we should do just fine!

Happy Spring!  Today finally feels like it's really here (I'm ignoring the forecast for possible snow tomorrow into Monday!).  If you see a dragonfly, may it bring you peace, harmony and joy.

Science: It's a Girl Thing

Girls can do science!  Putting together a tri-fold board presenting your results, on the other hand, is something of a challenge.

- me, last night (and in reality, probably more rudely put than that)

Big has a science project due next week.  She came up with a topic, made hypotheses, came up with a workable procedure, and conducted the experiment itself just fine.  Now it's time to summarize the results, type everything up, and put together the presentation.

This process was accompanied by much growling and complaining and gnashing of teeth.  And that was just me...I'm not sure how Big felt about it.  I assume close to the same since the evening ended with a mess in my living room and a kid who locked herself in her room far, far away from anything resembling either the experiment or her mother.

It's morning now.  Just after 7AM on a Sunday, which is an hour no one should ever have to see, in my humble opinion.  But here I am because my brain didn't get that memo and has been racing all night.  Major thoughts about the science project debacle, minor ones about a custom jewelry order I had all ready to ship out today but decided wasn't quite finished.  So I had to completely unpack it, make the change, and box it all back up.  Shredded packing material is nice and cushy, but gets EVERYWHERE, by the way.

Mission accomplished on the shipment (I like to get the small jobs out of the way so I can focus all of my energy on doing my best worrying about the big ones!) so now I can get back to telling you about last night.

We left off with Big locked in her room.  I was sitting on the living room floor, surrounded by various pieces of paper that somehow had to find their way onto a display board.  The gold standard trifold (the mere mention of which strikes terror in the hearts of most of my mom friends!) was too large for what Big had planned.  She hated having all of that empty white space so we'd tried something different, and basically it backfired.  As the architect of that particular plan, the outcome was obviously all my fault, as was everything else from her hatred of broccoli to the melting of the Polar ice caps.  When I screw up, apparently I don't mess around according to my kid.

Slowly it occurs to me that my child's love of and aptitude for science was being overshadowed by the fact that she fails Glue Stick 101.  A perfectly good experiment about which she'd been completely excited just five minutes prior was in pieces around me because she's can't attach one piece of paper to another piece of paper and make it look pretty.  Really?  Not on my watch.

I'm not proud of it, but what I ended up doing was reprinting the messed up pieces, fixing a few poorly cut and/or glued spots, and laying everything out so that it sort of filled the board.  All Big needed to do was actually glue everything in place.  Which I then went up to her room and told her I would help with in the morning.  Earned me MAJOR mom points, I even got hugs out of the deal.

It's done now.  Looks good, if you ask me.  But more importantly, the science part is solid and she still wants to work in a related field - marine biology - when she grows up.

I'm working on a custom piece right now, a charm necklace celebrating a young lady who, to quote her mom, is "a viola playing fencer who wants to be a malacologist (they study snails) and play with the National Symphony."   I'm having the best time working with that!  Who wants that kind of creativity squelched by a two inch tall tube of glue?  So keep on doing science, and all of those other unique things you do, girls...Mom's got your back when you need it!

Since I'm not even ready to give a sneak peek at that necklace, I'll leave you with another charm I just shipped out (not the one that had me up all night!).  This one shares more of those positive vibes I'm constantly sending my girls' way, hoping they'll sink in via osmosis or something.

Wishing you a day full of dreams, life, hope and love!

Every dream begins with a single wish.

Every dream begins with a single wish.

When I was growing up, it seemed like all the girls I know (yep, even me!) wished to be Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty.  Someday, our Prince would come and give us a kiss of true love.

I'm a stay at home mom to two amazing girls.  Their heroines are Mulan, Merida, Rapunzel, and Elsa.  Modern-day princesses who are strong, and brave, and self-saving.  And my dreams for them starts with the wish that they, too, will have such determination and independence.

That independence has been showing a lot more these days, as the girls need me for less and less.  It's a double-edged sword.  On one hand, I'm sad that my babies are growing up and can do so much more for themselves.  On the other hand, I'm so proud of their strength and the fact that they're becoming these amazing young women.

They're still young, though, and I need to find that balance between providing both roots and wings.  I started to think about finding a new way to teach not only my own girls, but maybe others as well, that they *can* be self-sufficient.  That they should continue to have faith in themselves and believe in the power of their dreams.

And, of course, now that I've got this extra free time on my  hands, having a hobby I enjoyed wouldn't hurt.

So I decided to make a few pieces of jewelry for fun.  Don't ask me why I settled on that, it just seemed like a good idea at the time.  I ordered a stamped metal starter kit and things just kind of went from there.  My first piece sort of summarized what was driving me -

That was about six months ago.  A lot has changed since then and my little hobby has taken on a life of it's own.  Landed me in physical therapy, too, but those are stories for another time.  That's why I decided to start this blog...to have a place to talk about the evolution of a dream (if only so that some day, my girls can read it), find a place to share some ideas, and make sense of what my ultimate goals really are.   I can't wait to see where it leads me.