I don’t think the moon entered my work when I started making jewellery.
It had probably been there much longer than that.
Some of my earliest memories of it are from being a little girl, standing in my dad’s back garden when we stayed with him. He would point things out in the night sky, constellations, planets, where things sat in relation to one another, and, of course, the moon.
I had a lamp in my bedroom with removable constellations that projected across the ceiling. I absolutely loved it.
I don’t remember deciding that the night sky was something I was interested in. It was just something I noticed.
And I think that’s still true now.
I’ve always noticed the moon
As I got older, the moon was just... there.
A random night when it looked particularly huge. A thin crescent hanging in an otherwise empty sky. Different colours. Different clouds. Different positions.
It was never exactly the same twice.
I’m also apparently incapable of seeing a particularly good moon without shouting:
“OH, LOOK AT THE MOON!”
Sometimes accompanied by an embarrassing amount of excitement.
I’ll stop the car. Take photographs. Film it. Go outside with my telescope. Occasionally I’ll plan an entire trip to the seafront just to watch it rise.
Sometimes I go alone. Sometimes with friends or family.
A couple of Christmases ago my boyfriend bought me a telescope because, by that point, everyone else had apparently realised I was the moon person before I had.
I use it whenever the sky gives me the chance.
Then the moon became something practical
My relationship with it changed again when I became a paddleboarding instructor.
Working on the sea meant constantly paying attention to the elements.
Weather. Wind direction. Sunrise. Sunset. Tides.
And the moon.
I had always known the moon affected the tides, but this was when I really started understanding the relationship.
Around the new moon and full moon, the gravitational pull of the Sun and Moon combine to create spring tides, larger differences between high and low water.
Around the quarter moons, those forces work more against one another and we get the smaller neap tides.
Suddenly the lunar cycle wasn’t just something beautiful happening above me.
It was moving the water beneath me too.
I knew to expect bigger tides around a full moon. I would look up moonrise and moonset times alongside sunrise and sunset and sometimes build paddleboarding experiences around them.
And I was lucky enough, more than once, to be out on the water while the moon rose.
Those are moments that stay with you.
The phases started to mean something else too
Somewhere around this time I became more interested in what people had associated with the different phases of the moon.
I would save things on Pinterest, read about lunar symbolism and find myself picking up books about the moon whenever I saw them in bookshops.
Eventually I started collecting them.
But the thing that really stayed with me wasn’t any single definition of a particular moon phase.
It was the cycle itself.
Waxing.
Full.
Waning.
Dark.
And then beginning again.
I started thinking about how natural that rhythm is everywhere else in nature, yet as humans we often expect ourselves to operate completely differently.
Always progressing.
Always producing.
Always certain.
Always moving forwards.
Nature doesn’t really work like that.
And neither do we.
There are periods of growth. Periods of fullness. Times when something reaches its peak. Times when things need letting go of. Times when very little appears to be happening at all.
And then, eventually, movement again.
That realisation changed something in the way I looked at my own life.
My life has basically been a sequence of moon phases
The more aware I’ve become of myself and the world around me, the more I’ve noticed those cycles everywhere.
Things end.
Interests change.
Relationships change.
Businesses change.
Versions of ourselves that once made perfect sense eventually don’t.
And sometimes we come back around to things we thought we had left behind, only from a completely different place.
One line from the Tao Te Ching has stayed with me for years:
“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”
It probably explains a lot about why nature has become such an important influence on Ebb & Flo.
Not because I think nature gives us neat answers.
More because it constantly demonstrates another way of moving.
Less force.
More rhythm.
Looking back, my life feels a little like a sequence of moon phases.
Which sounds ridiculous when I write it down.
But also... quite accurate.
Why that eventually became jewellery
So when I started creating moon jewellery, the symbolism was very conscious.
I wanted it to hold some of what the moon had come to represent for me.
Cycles.
Change.
Release.
Letting go of what no longer fits.
The reminder that no single phase is permanent, and that none of them are somehow the wrong one.
My first attempts didn’t quite work.
I made discs. I made crescents.
But they felt too plain. Too generic.
They looked like moons, but they didn’t feel like them.
The texture mattered.
I wanted the surface to have something lunar about it. Something irregular and tactile. Something your fingers would naturally move across when you wore it.
So I went back and remastered them.
That eventually became an important part of pieces like the Full Moon necklace, not simply a round silver pendant, but a surface inspired by something I had spent years watching.
Maybe that’s why it keeps appearing
The funny thing is that none of this started as branding.
I never sat down and decided Ebb & Flo needed to be associated with the moon.
It was much more like:
this is me, and this is how I see the world.
And somehow the jewellery followed.
Now I photograph pieces beneath full moons. I plan shoots around moonrise. I watch eclipses. I collect moon books. I drag the telescope outside at questionable hours.
And yes, I make quite a lot of moon jewellery.
Apparently one moon necklace was never going to be enough.
But I quite like that.
I like being a little quirky. A little weird. Interested in things enough to keep looking closer.
And I think that curiosity is part of Ebb & Flo too.
The moon is beautiful.
It changes constantly.
It moves the sea.
It has been watched by humans for far longer than any of us have been here, and will continue its cycle long after we’re gone.
For me, there’s something incredibly soothing about that.
Real.
Natural.
A reminder that everything has its phases.
Including us.
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