Förhäxa is Swedish for to bewitch. At the root of it sits häxa: the witch.

I make wards. A ward is a thing you wear into a room that isn't safe for you. You probably own one already and have never called it that. Your grandmother's watch. The ring you bought yourself. A stone that lives in your coat pocket.

Mine was my wedding band. Twenty years ago I walked alone into a room of men several levels above me to tell them their new product would cheat the customers who bought it. I put my hands under the table and turned the band, and it reminded me of someone who loved me and would be there no matter what. Then I gave my assessment, and I gave it steady. When one of the men moved to talk over me, the General Counsel stopped him and said he wanted to hear what I had to say. He backed me because I sounded like someone worth backing. I sounded that way because of a ring.

Except it wasn't the ring. The silver did nothing on its own. What I turned under that table was the thought of a person who loved me, and I brought that in with me. The band gave it somewhere to live.

That's the alchemy, and I mean the word. You bring the intention. The object holds it. Neither one works alone.

I build in silver and gold, brass, gemstone, bone, fur, and feather. Most of the stones I cut myself in my Seattle studio, faceting the ones that throw light and shaping cabochons for the ones that hold it. Then I forge the setting that carries them. If a stone came from another cutter's hands, its page says so.

Every piece I make ships with its ritual. Not instructions for wearing it, a practice for charging it: what to name, what to ask for, what to say when you put it on the first time. The piece arrives empty. You fill it.

My first fabrication class was at North Seattle College in June of 2022. I trained after that at Danaca Design, and I hold the Diploma in Silver Jewellery from Jewellers Academy in London. This fall I begin their Diploma in Fine Jewellery.

The rest of my week goes to Virago Coaching, where I work with women executives on reaching their own power at the moment they feel smallest. We build rituals. We dig out what self-doubt buried, and what somebody else handed them a long time ago. That looks like two careers. It isn't. One takes fifty minutes on a video call. The other takes a torch.

Virago is ancient Latin for a woman of strength and standing, carrying everything Rome handed to men and kept from us. Then the word turned. By the time it reached English it meant shrew, scold, a woman too loud for the room. Someone takes our words, sharpens them, and hands them back pointed the wrong way. I use it on purpose.

Some of these pieces have weight you feel all day. Some disappear under a collar. They protect the same.