The Earrings I Made for Me
Building something real is never just the triumphant moments. It's the weeks of preparation and the shaky morning and the first brave day and then getting knocked flat on your back and getting back up anyway.
Every maker remembers their first market.
The preparation that felt both completely thorough and wildly insufficient. The moment you look at everything you've made laid out on a table and think, is this enough? Is this good enough? The night before, when the excitement and the nerves become indistinguishable from each other.
I remember all of it. And I remember deciding, somewhere in the middle of all that feeling, that I needed to make myself a pair of earrings for the occasion.
Not just any pair. A pair that showed what was possible.
They started with a marble technique.
I blended dusty rose, slate blue, sage gray, and warm copper into the clay, slowly, deliberately, until the colors moved through each other in layers rather than blending flat. That kind of marbling takes patience. You're watching for the moment when it's swirled enough to be interesting but not so much that everything muddles together into nothing. There's a feel to it that's hard to explain until you've done it enough times to know.
The design was two pieces. A small organic oval stud for the top, irregular edges, a hole cut through the center, the kind of shape that looks effortless and isn't. And below it, connected by a gold jump ring, a bold arch. Wide, substantial, architectural. The kind of earring that has presence.
The arch was the challenge.
I didn't have a clay cutter for that shape, the specific horseshoe cutout at the base of the arch that gives it its distinctive silhouette. So I cut it by hand. Slowly, carefully, with the kind of focus that makes your shoulders tense up before you even realize it's happening. One wrong move and the whole piece would need to start over.
I cut it right. Both of them. Matching.
I remember looking at them before they went into the oven and feeling something I hadn't quite felt yet in this process, a quiet confidence. Not these are perfect. More like: these are exactly what I meant to make.
I want to be honest about what that first market felt like—
Because I think the pretty version of that story leaves out most of the truth.
I was nervous in a way that lived in my body, not just my head. The weeks leading up to it had been full of making and second-guessing and remaking and wondering if any of it was good enough. Who was I to show up at a market and ask people to spend money on something I had made in my kitchen in the evenings after work? What if nobody stopped? What if they stopped and weren't interested? What if they were interested and asked me questions I didn't know how to answer?
All of that was in my head on the morning of the market.
And then I put on those earrings.
I didn't want to put too much pressure on them.
They were just earrings, I told myself. But of course they weren't just earrings. They were the thing I had made for this specific day, for this specific version of myself, the one who was about to stand behind a table and say out loud, with her whole presence: I made these. This is Anam Cara Clay Goods. This is what I do.
The marbled clay. The hand-cut arch. The organic stud with the hole through the center. Worn on my ears at my first market, next to the pieces I had made for everyone else.
They did exactly what I needed them to do. Not because anyone noticed them, though some did, but because I noticed them. Every time I caught a glimpse of them or felt their weight, I remembered: I made something I love. I am exactly where I am supposed to be.
Those earrings still mean something to me.
Not as a product but as a maker. The place where the making stopped being private and became something I shared with the world.
And then, because life has a sense of humor, I got Covid.
After all the preparation. After the nerves and the hand-cut arch and the brave first day. I came home, took off those earrings, and spent the next stretch of time horizontal and miserable. The grand debut followed immediately by the grand collapse.
I laugh about it now. At the time I was less amused.
But even that felt right in its own way, because building something real is never just the triumphant moments. It's the weeks of preparation and the shaky morning and the first brave day and then getting knocked flat on your back and getting back up anyway.
Every pair since has been built on that first brave day. Covid and all.
