The Things We Reach For

There's a brooch sitting on my desk right now that I made years ago. I don't wear it every day. Some weeks I forget it's there entirely. But I never put it away. It stays on the corner of my table, near my lamp, and every so often my hand reaches for it. I've been thinking about why that is. I think we talk a lot about what we buy. The occasion, the price, the way something looks in a photo. But we talk much less about what we reach for. The things that earn a kind of permanence in our lives not because they were special when we got them, but because they kept proving themselves, quietly, over time. That brooch isn't the most technically complex thing I've ever made, nor is it the showiest. But there's something in the weight of it, the way the surface catches light at a certain angle, that still makes me stop. Still makes me feel something. I think that's what craftsmanship actually is. Not perfection. Not flawlessness. It's the thing that's still speaking to you five years later. I started this newsletter because I wanted somewhere to think out loud about exactly this. About why certain objects earn a place in our lives and others don't. About the gap between things that are beautiful and things that are meaningful, and what happens when they're the same thing. I'm a designer and a maker who simply notices the little details. I’ve spent most of my life making objects and thinking about how people live with them. And the question that keeps me up for me, if I'm honest, isn't "what should I make next?" It's "what makes something worth keeping?" I don't have a clean answer. But I find myself getting closer every time I sit down to write. I'm glad you're here for it. Warmest, Iris x