Formerly titled: How I accidentally swallowed a ball bearing aged 16 and also got into making jewellery!
OK - If you haven’t seen the social media post that sparked this title… read on, it will all make sense by the end.
Here it is, the long awaited(!), much requested(!!) blog about how I got started making jewellery. This story spans about 35 years, I’ll try to keep it brief but you might wanna grab yourself a brew or a gin, depending on what time it is for you (noooo judgement here, go for your life!).
So I was born with no fingers on my right hand. I guess that’s the crucial bit of the story. And the confident, not really bothered about it person you know today, wasn’t like that always. I spent quite a lot of my childhood trying to hide my lack of fingers. I hated being different, I really saw it as a weakness. I remember going on a bike ride with my Mum and trying to indicate right with my left hand. I also remember being at my church youth group one day, hands inside my sleeves (which I had found to be an excellent method of hiding my right hand) and one of the youth leaders sticking his hand up my sleeve, pulling my hand out of my sleeve whilst saying ‘what’s hiding up here then’ (I feel I should add at this point, he wasn’t one of ‘those’ people - I don’t think and I’m 90% confident that wouldn’t happen now!!).
Anyway, I digress (that will probably happen a lot - kids who’ve had me teach them Science will tell you that ‘digressing’ is one of my best skills (I hope)), at some point when I was a toddler (we’ll say 3 or 4 for arguments sake), I started to try and do absolutely everything with just my left hand. This is pretty restrictive. Means you need a lot of help from others. In order to encourage me to keep using my right hand, my Mum got me threading buttons on shirring elastic. The woman has the most incredible button tin! I’ve never thought to ask her where they all came from but its not a small tin and its almost full!! So we would thread the buttons and tie the ends and make necklaces.
As I got older and small objects became less of a choking hazard*, buttons were swapped for beads and shirring elastic for jewellers cord. Now, here is the bit of the story where on my social media post I put about the ball bearing incident. It really wasn’t part of the story at all - but when I wrote about choking hazards, I remembered the ball bearing story and thought I would add it for amusement, little did I know that it would be the bit of the story everyone was most interested in!! I’m leaving it for the end… don’t skip ahead now!!
I continued to make jewellery on and off. I love making things with my hands, my Grandma taught me to knit, embroider and sew my own clothes. I dabbled with card making. But ‘stringing beads together’ was something I always came back to.
Fast forward to 2013, and my newly married self became quite stressed out by my job (teaching high school Science). I ended up taking a few weeks off to get myself together and my husband and I started to talk about me having a creative challenge that had nothing to do with my work. At the same time, my local library put a flier through our door about a craft fair they were hosting. I joked that I could get a table… I ended up with a table! My style and range was REALLY different back then, almost unrecognisable from what you see today! I got a real buzz from doing the craft fair, but I wanted more. I started to wonder if you could buy silver and gold in a more ‘raw’ form, so I started researching. I bought a book, some basic tools and some silver. I then started attending classes, at the end of every term, it was my treat for making it though!
Fast forward again to 2016, I’d been documenting my jewellery making journey on a facebook page - back then I was ‘Little Owl Jewellery’, then ‘Hannah Rebecca Design’, then ‘Love Pink Jewellery’ - picking a business name is hard! In November of that year my little girl was born, a colleague tagged me on Facebook in a 7 day art challenge, I had to post a picture of something I’d made everyday for a week. On day 7 I posted a picture of a Rose Quartz pendant that I’d made in a jewellery class. Someone asked if they could buy it…!
I started to wonder if this could be a thing. So I did more research; Etsy, Social Media, Photography. I read every blog and watched every youtube video I could get my hands on while my newborn slept. And so it began. I changed the name of my business to Hannah Weston Jewellery (I figured all the big jewellery houses I knew of had the name of their founder, lol) and filled my Etsy shop with pieces and learnt as I went along.
And that’s it! Thats how I got into making jewellery and starting my business.
You’re still wondering about the ball bearing aren’t you (hi to the people who skipped straight to the bottom… I see you, ha ha). OK, so I was 16 and yes I absolutely should have known better! It was only small - I can’t remember what it was out of, but basically, I was ‘playing with it’ between my bottom lip and my teeth (you know like you’d chew a pen, or your finger nails.. except this was a tiny piece of metal!). I was sitting in my bedroom, I think (I say I think, because I absolutely remember this happening in the house my parents currently live in, but we didn’t move there til I was 18! So the details are sketchy!) and my Dad was upstairs.
‘What have you got in your mouth’ he said.
‘A ball bearing’ I said. ‘
‘That seems silly, be careful you don’t swallow it (or other similar but more direct words!)’
I looked up ‘I won’t swa…’ I looked shocked. ‘OK there’s a chance I’ve’ He cut me off. ‘Well that was daft (again, similar words but more direct)’
A brief discussion between my parents about their clever daughter resulted in my Dad phoning the doctors to ask, well err, what to do!! The doctor asked my poor poor Dad ‘How old is your daughter Mr Littlewood’, ‘She’s sheeshteen’ he mumbled not wanted to say my actual embarrassing age out loud. ‘How old?’ the doctor clarified “She’s sixteen’ he said loudly. ‘Oh it will just pass through’ replied the doctor.
The end
You’re welcome!
