tinahdee

Hi there! Thanks for stopping by my Etsy shop. My name is Tina and I am here to make for you a beautiful piece of jewelry that you could rightfully call "wearable art." I live in Florida with my family: my husband Darin and three of my five kids. Two of my children are grown up and have their own families now.

I’m very much a sensory-driven artist. By that, I mean the elements that go into the final product, and how I interact with those elements and how they interact with me, are all very important ingredients. I like to “get my hands dirty.” I discovered that gold and silver and copper metals are quite sensuous in the way they respond to being worked, and I find that very enjoyable. I have always loved stones, gems, and crystals, and so that love aligns well with idea of bending and shaping the metal. The fact that what results is a thing of lasting beauty, is deeply satisfying. Jewelry making seems to be particularly fulfilling in that way. Maybe it’s because we wear our favorite jewelry on our body and keep it close to us, we lock it up at night, we pass it on to our children. It makes an impression in a unique way.

I taught myself the actual craft of putting the jewelry together, mostly from reading books, online articles, and watching cool YouTube videos; then trying the basic functions myself, practicing over and over again to learn the right touch with the metal, to learn how to wrap a loop just so without nicking it all up, to figure out the right amount of pressure to put on the wire to make it bend smoothly without angles, how to solder and drill the metal. The whole thing started when I decided it would be a great idea to hand make 50 tiaras for a women’s conference - and I had never worked with wire before and had no clue what I was going to do. I found a book about tiara making, ordered it, and taught myself that way. I even came up with my own design, because the ones in the book were really pretty but didn’t quite fit the bill. I went through quite a bit of 26 gauge silver wire and spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours working, tearing apart, and reworking those crazy, beautiful tiaras. Ah, memories.

My artistic journey has led me around many twists and turns. I have been creating literally my entire life, using different mediums and building on that creative expression. In this part of my journey, I am working on jewelry. I’ve been doing that for about a year. Many of my creative pursuits overlap, for instance, I’m a writer. I’ve been supporting myself with that for ten years, but I’ve been doing it for much longer than that. I’m not going to stop writing now that I’ve begun creating jewelry. Those two things can work together quite nicely. I also play the acoustic guitar and sing and write songs. I attended the International Academy of Merchandising and Design (back when it was called that) and learned how to draft patterns, and do fashion illustration, and work with textiles. But before (and after) that I was always sewing. I designed wedding gowns and embellished them with crystals and pearls and sequins…. kind of sounds like what I do now, except I’m playing with metal instead of fabric. I’ve recently become much more focused on my photography skills, especially composition, because I take pictures of all my jewelry work - but I’ve been interested in photography all along. It all overlaps and interweaves, and I think what I am doing now is really just a culmination of all the other things I have done — though I will say that jewelry-making is a particularly rewarding and soul-satisfying endeavor and I believe this is one of those things that I will want to keep doing forever. I think it’s a part of my soul. It just took me a while to discover it.

Read more about me and my shop: https://web.archive.org/web/20141012084447/https://blog.etsy.com/en/2012/quit-your-day-job-tinahdee/

Are you engaged? https://web.archive.org/web/20190416084233/https://www.tinahdee.com/pages/are-you-engaged