So, I woke up this morning with all these ambitious plans, grocery shopping, cleaning, creating a funky little serving piece for my sister-in-law’s catering company, and finally finishing a piece commissioned by a friend of mine so long ago, it’s undergoing it’s third incarnation, (more about that in a later blog). I’m humming along and I sit down at my workbench…and I’m out of balls. That’s not nearly as bad as it sounds. Almost all of the work I’m doing currently uses a process called granulation, fusing silver together using a low flame and no solder. The designs are done using flattened wire and little teeny-tiny silver balls. And I’m out of balls. Now like so many things in life, I can’t just call Balls R Us and have a batch of balls delivered. I have to make them. This involves wrapping silver wire about a thousand times around a tiny metal dowel and then meticulously snipping each ring at the same place so I have a thousand little tiny rings of the same size which I will then melt into a thousand little teeny-tiny balls. I hate it. It’s tedious, time-consuming, and completely uncreative. But I love those balls. I couldn’t do what I love without those balls. So, I’ll wrap and snip and melt and swear when the balls roll off the table never to be seen again, or fuse into one giant ball because they’re too close together. And I’ll pray that after all the work, the finished product is as beautiful as the vision in my head, which is always a little scary. And that someone other than my mom loves them as much as I do, which is a lot scary. But I’ll do it anyway, because I love it and because sometimes, it’s just about the balls.

Cupid’s Arrow