but in 2009, when I founded Eleven and One Design, I was thinking about trash quite a lot.

Not just any old tuna fish can/moldy leather boot/last week's left-overs trash, though. I was thinking more of the kind with potential. The kind with a story that's not finished being told. I wondered to myself, am I the only one who hears it? Are the possibilities of a lonely, abandoned penny or a tossed-out-the-window soda can lost on everyone but me? Surely not. But is what I see in these things worth exploring anyway? Definitely.

So I retired to my room, with its pumpkin-colored cathedral ceiling and rumpled clothes strewn across the floor, and started to make the things I saw in my head.

It wasn't a hobby, and it wasn't a distraction - I was on a mission. For reasons that felt very important to me, I had to show the world that even our trash, abandoned and taken for granted, contains the makings of something spectacular. I would gather together the most unlikely ingredients and coax them into their brilliance, simply by giving them my time and appreciation. (This is a formula I've since come to realize works in most situations.)

So here I am, a few year later, still making art (wearable and otherwise) and still trying to finish the stories that need telling. I've broadened my repertoire a little - occasionally trading in crushed glass for gem stones - but my vision remains the same: to carefully excavate something precious and delightful from even the most humble of places.

Hopefully along the way I can inspire others to do the same.