So, it’s 10 whole years of Iceni Jewellery! I’m not going to lie, I haven’t stuck with any job for more than 5 years, and I thought that was good going (I was a pet & equine photographer then!)
Being a bit neuro-spicy, I get terribly bored with routine, having to work the same hours, going to work on the same bus and doing the same thing every day tore my very soul apart! No matter how I tried, I couldn’t keep to those routines, I bobbed around from job to job until my last employed role as a community worker, which I really enjoyed. I loved that each day was different, I could be teaching an 80 year old how to use a computer, or be part of a team organising a huge community event, or help to plant up a whole housing estate of gardens, or plan and produce a Christmas dinner for 40 people with a whole network of fabulous giving people - it was wonderfully refreshing, but sadly, just as many community projects rely on funding, the money for that project dried up and I was made redundant. I went on to develop my hobby of photography into the pet & equine photography business and experienced being my own boss for a while. I liked that. A lot. I vowed I’d never go back and work in an office again – at least, not for anyone else.
At the end of September 2015, man and I packed up our rented flat, put all we owned in a storage container and went to live in a caravan with our two dogs on the farm where Mumma Iceni was living. We were waiting for the keys of our new house – and the best thing about the house for me was its aging summer house at the bottom of the garden!
Sleeping in the caravan back at the farm lasted all of a week before I decided Mum’s sofa was the better option. Being 6 foot tall, my legs were too long for the bed and I couldn’t get out of my head all the True Crime documentaries I’d watched - and a surprising number of caravans featured a lot in them. So, I left the man the full experience of caravan slumber, and maybe-murderers (because I’m generous like that) and hot-footed it to the Mothership! (which, to be fair was barely 20 steps away from the caravan!)
Midnight snacks from a fully stocked fridge and being woken in the morning with a Mum-made cuppa and a demand to "stay in bed until the house warms up" was of course highly desirable and I wasn’t about to shirk that opportunity was I? Man got a good night sleep without me moaning about my cold feet whilst I concentrated on making a massive me-shaped dent in Mum’s luxurious huge sofa.
Various iterations of the aging shed over the years!
Along with the idea of moving in with Mum whilst we waited for the house to complete, I’d also made the huge decision to stop working as a pet photographer – my poor old knees were feeling the strain of wet photoshoots and rolling about muddy fields and beaches, capturing the madness of a hundred dogs, or crouching for hours waiting to catch a cat’s better side without them knowing, or laying vulnerable yet in awe in a paddock with a 15 hand horse galloping towards me and my camera! (it happened and I thought I was going to die, but I was damn sure I was going to take ‘the’ shot before I did!) Thankfully I survived when stampeding hooves skidded to a halt just feet in front of me, I wasn't a gonner after all!
Whilst I still maintain that pet & equine photography was The Best Job in the World, my arthritic joints screamed at me to stop. It was taking me longer and longer to get my legs going in the morning, my knees seizing and my back howling - so I stopped.
We had 5 weeks to wait for completion and the keys to our house and I’d managed to save a little bit of money to fund those weeks and the bare bones of the beginnings of a new business, which would eventually be created in the aging summer house at the end of our new garden.
Just one snag. The new business was entirely unknown to me. Metalsmithing. I’d never tried it, and I had no clue how to even do it! I’d been an avid beader in my spare time, putting together pretty things - but I’d never even held a jeweller’s saw before, let alone used one to create anything. I had five weeks to cram as much business start-up and training as I could muster before launching.
I set my computer up in Mum’s front room, and as the Man went to work each day, I settled at the dining table and studied. I watched hours and hours of Youtube tutorials on how to solder and saw, how to hammer, what metal gauges were and the melting points of each alloy. I learned what a pickle pot was, and what different types of pliers were called. I watched how to use a rolling mill, and how to melt precious metals to create more beautiful things and I read like a demon, sucking up every bit of knowledge I could – and as I learned, I wrote a list of every tool and accessory I would need to get me started, and created accounts with jeweller suppliers whilst thinking up a name for my new business, and playing with logo ideas for its branding.
The four Iceni logos over 10 years!
I was everso excited at the prospect of reinventing myself. For as long as I could remember I’d yearned for a space just for creating, as a child all I did was draw, paint, read, write and make things, I didn’t follow that path as a career because my stupid head said that having a corporate job in London was far more appropriate – and I tried so hard, had some brilliant jobs, but they each took a little bit of my soul away with them. I only ever wanted to be an artist, of some shape or form – I really didn’t want to wear smart shoes and iron my clothes every day! I wanted messy aprons and even messier hair – and here I was, at the age of 42, just weeks away from living the dream! All my Christmases had come at once and I was going to make the absolute most of the blessings I’d been given.
We got the precious keys, and moved into our own little home with its white-washed 170 year old walls and original internal doors, and I started arranging my summerhouse, 'The Shed', into my workshop. Our old dining table was far too big for our tiny new dining room, so I turned it into my bench, and added a square of oak as a bench pin to lean my silver against when I eventually came to saw, file and shape it. The Shed was single skin, freezing cold, and as I sat inside it that first day, I saw that a vine of ivy had crept through the cracks in the slatting, threatening to take over. I didn’t care though - this shed was mine - all mine!
