21. Reigniting the flame

How I'm reengaging with the biggest thing I've ever left behind.

My grateful thanks to Bryn Robinson of Substack ‘Campfire Notebook’. Her post ‘Elegy for the Burning’ got me thinking about the flame that’s missing from my life. My ‘Dear Reader’ letter below it is an elegy of my own.

Elegy for the Burning: Campfire Notebook #20

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Rebecca at the torch flame. Photograph courtesy of Jim Holden.

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Dear Reader,

Is process something to value in its own right?

William Morris wrote:

Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.

But what if there are things in your house which are only there because the process to create them brings you such joy that their usefulness or their beauty are irrelevant? How do such things earn their place? What is their purpose, if they are not to be functional or decorative? In fact, do they need a purpose at all?

In 2004, after a major reboot gave me some unanticipated space and time away from life’s treadmill (thanks, autoimmunity) I fell in love at an art show. Not with a person, nor with a piece of art, but with a process.

I watched as glass artist Diana East lit up a torch flame and reached for a rod of glass. Before my eyes she melted a gather of glowing glass and wound it onto a mandrel – and by turning, turning, turning the mandrel to balance the liquid glass, in just moments she had shaped a bead using heat, gravity, confidence and expertise.
Reader, it was magical.

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Rebecca winding a spiral disc bead. Photograph courtesy of Jim Holden.

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On the spot I enrolled on a course with Diana for later that year, and after that I took another. I was hooked. Before long I’d built a shed in my parents’ garden, populated it with the basic tools and equipment I would need for making my own lampwork glass beads, and threw myself into practising this captivating craft.

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(Video courtesy of Jim Holden. Running time 34 seconds. No sound.)

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After accumulating a fairly sizeable stash I felt I ought to grant a purpose to all the beads I was making, and tried to sell them at a local general craft fair. They were admired, sure, but people didn’t know what to do with them.

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Eden harlequin pair. Photograph courtesy of Jim Holden.

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‘You could make them into jewellery’, I suggested, brightly.
‘Yes, or you could. I’d buy jewellery. What would I do with loose beads?’

So I started to make jewellery. With practice I became pretty good at wireworking sterling silver findings into earrings and pendants, but this was something that took me away from my torch flame, and it made me sad.

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Violet sky harlequin earrings. Photograph courtesy of Jim Holden.

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So concentrating again on the beads, I joined a community of beadmakers and started to attend bead fairs. This was my market: here were both business- and hobby-jewellery makers looking for unique and beautiful components for their own projects.

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Two shades of sparkle. Photograph courtesy of Jim Holden.

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I would talk to customers about my passion for the process: how for me it was all about shaping the glass in the flame, rather than the end product.

‘Do you teach?’
No, I didn’t. But I supposed I could.

Now back on my own two feet again after my health issues, I moved house and began to welcome students into my new two-torch workshop for taster sessions and all-day courses. At first I taught informally, then later I took a course with the local authority to become a qualified teacher of adults.

Twice a year I would open my workshop for local open studio events where I would demonstrate at the torch flame, explaining every step as I went along. People loved it! My informal sales team of supportive family members did a roaring trade selling my bead-and-silver wirework jewellery and were enthusiastic in handing out flyers for my beadmaking courses.

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I married and moved again, necessitating another change of workspace. This time I rented a workshop in a little cluster of small business units in the centre of our rural village, and now I was really going for it: this time I had four torches and a permanent sales area. And a rent bill.

I started attending more – and bigger – bead fairs, both with my loose beads and finished jewellery, and wrote regular illustrated tutorials for a bead magazine. With these strings to my bow adding to my newly-discovered enthusiasm for social media, my beads and my courses were in high demand.

I had a great website – thanks, Squarespace – and a growing cohort of returning students. My beads were selling worldwide. My courses had participants travelling sometimes hundreds of miles to learn with little ol’ me in rural Sussex.
All had seemed well.

But was it? Cards on the table: I expect a great deal from myself. Too much, in fact. I was finding it hard to keep up with the demands I was placing on myself. Lampwork glass beadmaking was – had been – my passion, and in my attempts to treat it as a business I was losing my way.
Am I even a business person? No, absolutely not.
Reader, I would struggle to sell ice pops in a heatwave.

Covid hit. We didn’t – couldn’t – leave the house. And then, once we were allowed to, I wouldn’t. The four walls of home were friendlier than the ones of my workshop. The walls at home didn’t challenge me. And home was where my favourite things were: my kitchen, my garden, my bookshelves, my desk, my manic-to-the-point-of-unhealthy YouTube exercise routine.

Home had no torch. No beads. No students. No sales. No pressure.

Outside, Covid confusion reigned. Restrictions were changed, enforced, lifted and reimposed. Once they were finally removed altogether, the people around me started cautiously back at work.

Yet bead fairs and craft events remained at a standstill: no in-real-life sales were happening. And after their initial peak due to the enthusiasm of home crafters on furlough keen to make creative use of the unanticipated time on their hands, my online bead sales began to fall.

Still smarting from refunding unfulfillable bookings at the start of lockdown, I looked into relaunching my courses. Yet no matter how I looked at it, there was no way I could be sure that my workshop was 100% Covid safe. I kicked about in there for weeks thinking about it, unhappily winding half-hearted gathers of glass into I-suppose-I-ought-to beads.

And anyway, something was missing. I was missing. I was no longer present in my own creative world. It was time to say goodbye.

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Winding a mixed gather of coloured transparent glass and opaque enamel onto a mandrel. Photograph courtesy of Jim Holden.

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I disposed of some of my equipment, emptied my workshop and handed back the keys.

For weeks my beautiful website cruelly taunted me, reminding me on every one of my metaphorical-bruise-poking visits that I’d failed.

Eventually I deleted my website and closed my Squarespace account.
And my course-scheduling software account.
And my merchant account for card payments.
I cancelled my Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts so as not to feel the weight of any outside expectations on me. After all, failing at my own expectations for myself had been too much already.

And how did I feel?
I felt relieved. Pleased.

It was Christmas 2020 when I stepped out of my workshop for the last time. Suddenly I was saving money: no rent, no insurance, no kit maintenance, no alarm servicing, no phone line, no broadband, no electricity or water bills. No bill for propane to fuel my torches.

And no IT costs. When I deleted my website I had felt that I couldn’t justify the annual spend on the online life of something which was by now a non-business, an empty brand.

Well now. My brand had been great, and my website was beautiful. If only I’d thought to put it on ice rather than sending it up in flames. Now that I’ve worked through some of my issues around it all, I’d probably have liked to defrost it.

Why? Because last week I found myself writing this in my journal:

Feeling as if I might want to make a bead again. But what’s the point if I’m not going to sell or teach? Whatever would I do with them?’ #dilemma

Reader, I have the answer. I don’t need to do anything with them. I only need the process. The glow, the stretch, the pull, the drop; the melting, the winding, the turning, the shaping. Those are what I need. Not the round pieces of tiny glass art: just the act of making them.

So here I am, wanting to dip a metaphorical toe back into the torch flame. To revel in the glow and the magic of molten glass. To turn, turn, turn a mandrel in the flame to guide a gather into an even bead using the physics of surface tension. To zone out, to breathe, to stretch my creative wings to make something that I love not for its finished beauty but for the sheer thrill of the process.

That will be enough.

Love, and let fire inspire,

Rebecca

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Have you ever left a part of yourself behind? Would you ever go back? Did you?

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