The Women Who Keep Finding Their Way Here.

I didn't design my jewellery for a specific profession. I made pieces rooted in nature, symbolism, and the kind of quiet moments that don't always get marked. I thought about the feeling I wanted them to carry. I didn't think much about who, exactly, would end up wearing them.

So I was surprised, and then I wasn't, when I started noticing who keeps finding their way here.

Nurses. Teachers. Therapists. Midwives. Social workers. Counsellors. Carers. The women who spend their working days holding other people's hardest moments. They turn up in my world with a quiet regularity that I've started to pay attention to.

What I notice isn't just the occupations. It's something in the way they talk about the piece once they have it. There's often a slight pause in the language, a hesitation around the act of buying something for themselves at all. One woman told me she doesn't feel comfortable spending money on herself, even when it isn't hers to worry about. Another said she used her birthday as the excuse she needed. A third said simply: I gave myself permission.

That last phrase "I gave myself permission" has stayed with me. Because for someone who spends their professional life giving permission to others, naming it so plainly feels like it costs something.

I'm not a therapist. I'm not going to tell you what this means. But I notice that a woman who has sat with grief all week might reach for something small and worn and hers in a way that feels different to buying jewellery for the sake of it. That a piece she chose slowly, returned to repeatedly, and finally bought for herself carries a different weight to one that was simply pretty.

I think about this when I'm making. The piece on the bench doesn't know who it's going to. But somewhere, there's a woman at the end of a long week, doing the particular arithmetic of whether she's allowed something just for herself. I don't know her name. I don't know her week. I just know she keeps finding her way here, and I'm glad she does.

I made a necklace from recycled silver, textured with the memory of the full moon rising over the sea at Cleethorpes. I made it because I love the moon, that particular wonder I feel watching it climb above the water, the way it makes the ordinary feel significant. I thought other moon lovers might find it too.

I wasn't wrong about that. But I didn't anticipate who those moon lovers would turn out to be, or what they'd be carrying when they found it.