This story spans about 35 years, I’ll try to keep it brief but you might wanna grab yourself a brew or a gin, depending on what time it is for you.
So I was born with no fingers on my right hand. I guess that’s the crucial bit of the story. And the confident, not really bothered about it person you know today, wasn’t like that always. I spent quite a lot of my childhood trying to hide my lack of fingers. I hated being different, I really saw it as a weakness. I remember going on a bike ride with my Mum and trying to indicate right with my left hand.
At some point when I was a toddler (we’ll say 3 or 4 for arguments sake), I started to try and do absolutely everything with just my left hand. This is pretty restrictive. Means you need a lot of help from others. In order to encourage me to keep using my right hand, my Mum got me threading buttons on shirring elastic. The woman has the most incredible button tin! I’ve never thought to ask her where they all came from but its not a small tin and its almost full!! So we would thread the buttons and tie the ends and make necklaces.
As I got older and small objects became less of a choking hazard, buttons were swapped for beads and shirring elastic for jewellers cord.
I continued to make jewellery on and off. I love making things with my hands, my Grandma taught me to knit, embroider and sew my own clothes. I dabbled with card making. But ‘stringing beads together’ was something I always came back to.
Fast forward to 2013, and my newly married self became quite stressed out by my job (teaching high school Science). I ended up taking a few weeks off to get myself together and my husband and I started to talk about me having a creative challenge that had nothing to do with my work. At the same time, my local library put a flier through our door about a craft fair they were hosting. I joked that I could get a table… I ended up with a table! My style and range was REALLY different back then, almost unrecognisable from what you see today! I got a real buzz from doing the craft fair, but I wanted more. I started to wonder if you could buy silver and gold in a more ‘raw’ form, so I started researching. I bought a book, some basic tools and some silver. I then started attending classes, at the end of every term, it was my treat for making it though!
Fast forward again to 2016, I’d been documenting my jewellery making journey on a facebook page - back then I was ‘Little Owl Jewellery’, then ‘Hannah Rebecca Design’, then ‘Love Pink Jewellery’ - picking a business name is hard! In November of that year my little girl was born, a colleague tagged me on Facebook in a 7 day art challenge, I had to post a picture of something I’d made everyday for a week. On day 7 I posted a picture of a Rose Quartz pendant that I’d made in a jewellery class. Someone asked if they could buy it…!
I started to wonder if this could be a thing. So I did more research; Etsy, Social Media, Photography. I read every blog and watched every youtube video I could get my hands on while my newborn slept. And so it began. I changed the name of my business to Hannah Weston Jewellery (I figured all the big jewellery houses I knew of had the name of their founder, lol) and filled my Etsy shop with pieces and learnt as I went along.
And that’s it! Thats how I got into making jewellery and starting my business.
