From a young age, I have always collected pretty rocks, shells and bits of “stuff”.
In my 20s I became a diehard rockhound – I joined a club and travelled around to various quarries and actively dug pretty rocks out of the ground. Bashing open a pocket and discovering sparkly crystals inside gave me a fantastic rush of excitement! There were very few surfaces in my house that weren’t covered in the treasures I’d bought, traded or brought home.
One of the activities the club offered was making wire jewelry. But, to be honest, it didn’t appeal to me, because most of the wire jewelry I saw looked…. rustic. I had a hard time believing that you could make something beautiful out of a couple of bits of wire.
In 1995, a year after the death of my mother, and a divorce from a very difficult relationship, I was living alone for the first time. I found being on my own refreshing and liberating: I had the time and space to think my own thoughts, make choices and be fully responsible for myself without having to take someone else’s opinions or needs into consideration. I loved being independent! My apartment was near a beach, so I took long, restorative walks on the shore. And, of course, being a rockhound, I always walked with my eyes down, scanning…
One day, I spotted something in the water and stooped down to pick it up. It turned out to be a worthless piece of beach glass – a piece of junk. I was about to throw it back into the lake when a stray thought popped into my head:
“This would make a really neat piece of jewelry.”
Immediately, the thought turned into an obsession.
I HAD to make this into a piece of jewelry RIGHT NOW. But how? I had no tools, no metal, nothing. Then I remembered that one of the club members ran a hobby shop that carried lapidary supplies: I could buy some wire. Making the trek out to the hobby shop was no easy feat: I lived in downtown Toronto with no car, and the shop was located on the outermost edges of the suburbs. Multiple changes of subway and buses, and over an hour later, I finally got there and purchased a few feet of sterling silver wire. Then I bought some electrical pliers from a hardware store and got to work.
I made a pendant out of the beach glass and a handmade chain, and right away, my mind began to spin with other ideas for jewelry.
I had caught fire, and I was hooked! From then on, I would come home from my day job and spend hours each night playing with my wire.
Within three years I was selling my work in galleries and at craft shows. I still wasn’t fussed by the traditional forms of wire working, so I did a lot of experimenting. Not everything I created worked the way I envisioned it, but some pieces had what a friend of mine called “The Spark of Divine Madness”.
At the same time I decided that I needed to better understand the mechanics and terminology of making jewelry, so I signed up for con-ed courses at a local community college. That changed my life in two ways: I learned that most people in “the industry” didn’t consider wire working to be a legitimate form of jewelry making, and I met the man who would eventually become my husband.
The instructor in my first course, after hearing I was a wire worker, flippantly commented: “After you take my course, you’ll never go back to wire.” I thought, “You don’t know me very well.”
The next week I brought samples of my jewelry to show her, and she commented “Hmm… maybe you will go back to wire.” Being able to impress this 30 year goldsmith was a huge affirmation that I was on to something. Ever since, it’s been a point of pride for me to be able to surprise people with the design possibilities offered by wire.
My future husband was a fellow student in the class. He’d signed up because he wanted to meet women. He figured that he had a better shot at it in a jewelry making class than in the woodworking class he really wanted to take. He walked in on the first day, decided I was cute, and took the work bench next to me. I was so fixated on learning to make jewelry that it took him a year to convince me to go out with him….
At my day job, I got the opportunity to go for training on a new invention called The World-Wide Web and discovered that there were text-based message groups on every subject imaginable. Naturally, I went looking for a rockhounding group, and, sure enough, found one. Within a few months of being introduced to the basics of setting up a page online, I bought a home computer, a dial-up internet service and built my first website. I also went looking for message boards for wire working, and found one that let you share photos. I’d found a passionate and supportive “tribe” that spanned the globe.
My jump into the online world brought me into contact with a wire jewelry enthusiast named Helen Goga, who was launching a magazine dedicated to the craft. I was thrilled to contribute several articles during the six year run of The Wire Artist Jeweller.
It became a trailblazing, award-winning publication, instrumental in increasing the awareness and popularity of wire working.
My designs were also published in two hugely successful books about wire jewelry: “All Wired Up” by Mark Lareau, and “Wire in Design” by Barbara McGuire.
I often got emails from people telling me that they loved my jewelry – did I have patterns for them?
Initially I was put off by the requests for tutorials, but eventually they became so frequent that I decided maybe my target market wasn’t the people who buy wire jewelry: it was the people who make it. Although my focus had always been on selling my jewelry, I also taught workshops through the rockhounding club, at George Brown College (Toronto, Canada) – the same college I’d studied jewelry making at – and in connection with a Wire Artist Jeweller-hosted convention in the USA.
I found that I really enjoyed teaching – especially the raw beginners. In my 8 week class at the college, the students would go through a series of projects that built their skills. It was fun watching them go from struggling newbies, wrestling with their tools and wire, to being able to finish wearable pieces! In the final class, I set a challenge for them: take at least three of the techniques they had learned, and combine them into a piece of their own original design. One of my students, Joan, spent weeks agonizing about this project, and became completely creatively paralyzed. She kept insisting that she wouldn’t be able to do it, and I kept insisting that she had to try.
Finally, the day came and the pressure was on. I sat quietly, watching her fuss and frown and sweat. By the end of the three hours, she had produced a piece that incorporated one technique she was comfortable with, one technique she had never done before (she’d missed that class), and one technique so brilliantly adapted that she surprised even herself with the way it turned out. She took a leap of faith, made the choice to push herself beyond what she thought she was capable of, and in doing so opened up an expanded world of creative possibilities. Although I had talked about that experience, she told me afterwards that discovering it for herself was like a light going on in her head – a watershed moment where she “got” it. She left the class that day with a triumphant smile that still inspires me today.
Within another few years, I was married with two small children, and had left my day job. I loved being a mom, but still felt driven to be creative. Partly because I want to network within the fine crafts community, and partly because I wanted to continue raising the profile of wire jewelry, I joined the Metal Arts Guild of Canada, where I took on the role of Vice President and later President. Later still, I became the Editor of the Guild’s publication, called “MAGazine”. Through MAGC I met many supremely talented metal artists, who inspired me to focus even more on innovation, craftsmanship and quality in my own designs.
Selling through craft shows was no longer feasible. It was too difficult to juggle parenting, travelling the craft show circuit and my husband’s work schedule. So in 2007 I launched a new website dedicated to selling tutorials and promoting my classes. I also set up an Etsy shop. Online selling and publishing became my focus, and I contributed pieces to several more books, including “Contemporary Bead and Wire Jewelry” by Suzanne Tourtillot and Nathalie Mornu, and “500 Earrings” by Lark Books.
A year later I was invited to teach summer classes at the Haliburton School of the Arts, a well regarded craft and design college in northern Ontario. Many of the people buying my tutorials told me they would love to take classes with me, but travelling to Canada was too expensive. That inspired me to start looking at ways to teach classes online.
The thing I liked best about live classes is the interaction: I demonstrated the steps, and then the students worked on their individual projects. We’d sit side by side, talking through challenges. I’d watch how they handle their tools, see where they struggled, offering suggestions and letting them know what they were doing well; they could ask questions as they went along and bounced ideas around based on what they learned. I loved watching them take off in a new direction as they mastered the skills, and was able to offer immediate and detailed feedback about things they’ll needed to watch out for. The learning was social and collaborative. Many of the people I’ve taught over the years have become good friends.
Ideally, I wanted to replicate that experience in any online class I taught. The trick was finding a platform that would let me do it at a reasonable price. Webinar technology was in its infancy: it was expensive and nowhere close to what I envisioned for my classes.
I had thought about making video tutorials, and launched a YouTube channel in 2010, but didn’t seriously pursue it until four years later, when I stumbled across a program offered by Holly Gillen called “Zero to Hero”. It was a 15 day challenge designed to help me get used to talking to a camera. It felt like something had “clicked”: I jumped into video production, and spent the next two years learning everything I could from Holly. Making video tutorials was the next best thing to teaching a live class.
Towards the end of 2015, webinar and live video technology finally caught up to what I had in mind, and I was finally able to start offering live, interactive, online wireworking classes. The Tao of Wire served as my online teaching studio until early 2022, when I started feeling the call to go back to making jewelry exclusively.
The word “Tao” loosely translates as “path”, but that path is not expressly obvious: there is an element of mystery that feeds an intuitive need for discovery. For me, “Tao” is an invitation to go on a creative journey.
In the summer of 1995, I didn’t know that my love of sparkly crystals would end up with me keeping a random piece of junk rather than throwing it back into the water. And I didn’t know where that a little piece of beach glass would lead me: only that I needed to go there.
Today, my life is nothing like the one my 20-something self could have imagined: it’s better.
My goal has always been to bless the world by adding to its beauty. My heart sings every time someone posts a photo of themselves wearing one of my pieces or a piece they’ve made from one of my tutorials. And every time I walk on a beach, I still come home with a pocket full of rocks.
© 2022 Dianne Karg Baron