The Jewelers Journey in Mind and Body

Written by Jason S Jowett

This most popular hobby started quite innocently for a traveler on a shoestring. Sometimes you can’t say no. No matter the financial burden the choice carries, when you’re approached by that mystery person clad in ethnic garb, walking a path thousands of generations, if not hundreds of thousands have trod, you just have to cave in. So it happened that I found myself in possession of a bundle of jewelry strings with no plan to wear them. The justification was to offload these at a later date to another fortunate soul as a gift. A realization however eventually struck me like a bolt of lightning. I could be a jeweler.

Donning my scissors, I cut up my first procurances and began to consider reassembling the multitude of beads within them into something more desirable for myself to adorn or to sell onwards. This was the beginning of a fascinating journey. It was a journey within a journey in fact, right across the wide blue-green planet earth. From jeweler to jeweler I had acquired a second purpose, a multiplicity of function and style. The richest source I soon found in the mazework of streets in Varanasi, India, were the jewelry baba’s who possessed vast troves of any and every variety of bead imaginably spun from the earth, and more yet crafted by blade and burning fire. This was to be a magical journey indeed.

Learning the crystals was a deep inspiration. In name of color and texture, form and appearance there were endless varieties, and qualities to rate and value. Each harboring a unique desire to be paired up, each bead, whether wood, plastic, bone, shell, stone, or metal was to be worked in combination, for a new unique value that spoke a distance of creative potential. Then these patterns; each asserting a complex authority in combination sequences, delicately woven on string for binding around the neck, wrist, ankle or waist, would be the treasure themselves beyond the mind’s own hidden laneway. The string indeed presented a more decisive integrity, limiting the creative spark with hard physical property. Hemp became my first office space before incorporation with the all-popular Nylon. Even then, waxed or hard nylon caused a major division of potential, through grades of thickness counterbalancing the more assured multiple string concourses; all hard forms beset creative law.

The second vital tool for the journey jeweler became my cigarette lighter, so I was required to mold a needle-like protrusion at the end of the nylon cutting. Carefully the nylon would be measured in length for ease of threading, to avoid twisting problems of six meter long strings, or either running out of string or wasting it off-cuts. My big toe indeed became the necessary appendage often to hold steady a macramé creation. Yet this skill, the shaping of a needle on melted plastic at the strings tip, was the deal-breaker at times. Since and mostly rare beads had been drilled through from one side only, the hole was naturally far smaller at one end of the little stone bead than the other. Hours in fact could easily be spent on a cutting of red coral for example, with 6 dozen options of individual beads, all relegated worth against difficulty in such accordance. Hours were easily spent attempting to thread such beads utilizing with the smallest options with the thinnest nylon, which, at a minimum standard to account for wear and tear, still ensured the final product wouldn’t suddenly break apart, sending out into the ether a cascade of precious or semi-precious beads. The scale of difficulty could be partially assessed of course on the outset when procuring the said string of red coral, and on inspection of the drillings. Even then and on particularly good quality material such as this it was still worth the chance that a dozen beads would be useless once cut from the micro cotton fibers holding them together on retail.

A meditation at large, the stringing of some beads was best achieved once only. If and when of course the near inch-long micro fine needle protrusion fashioned with a flaming quick swivel and twist between the index finger and thumb, allowed you a success otherwise impossible. In such cases and these are not rare, you had best plan your placements, for the sharper your eye the longer you'll live, both eternally and on the human appendage.