More than One jewel a day: the many benefits of #onejeweladay

Two weeks in, and “One Jewel A Day” has already been a revelation. I had several expectations of what would happen, and some of them turned out to be correct, others less so - but most importantly, there have been some very positive surprises.


Creating so much and so fast, by my standards at least, has occasionally been as stressful as I expected, but it also brought me benefits I didn't anticipate. First of all, instead of being frozen in a world of constant deadlines and rushed work, I quite enjoyed the new pace. My natural tendency is to take things slowly and ponder every single move, but working at a faster pace brought a new lightness to my work. I found the challenge of coming up with something original to very energizing - and, as always, I like a challenge.

Image creation courtesy of canva.com

However, the real discovery was that I have many more ideas and models ready to be put into practice than I ever suspected. Instead of coming up with mere repetitions of jewelry that I have already created, working faster actually freed me from my usual patterns, and my work is now more spontaneous - more adventurous, even.

After admitting from the beginning that not all of my work might turn out equally well (at least by my standards), I have been much more ready to take risks, and they have been very rewarding. I am glad I had written about these things in my last post - that “One Jewel A Day” might mean forced progress, and that it might mean that my standards might slip. However, as I found out, there is something very liberating in having a sympathetic audience. I am very grateful for those of you who reached out to me about #onejeweladay.

Last but not least, in addition to what happens here between me, my materials, and my readers, this project has also had the great advantage of indulging my love of photography by giving me the perfect excuse to take pictures and post them on Instagram and Tumblr, two platforms I knew poorly and which I mostly neglected. I discovered that I quite like them, so now I'm actually very much at ease with these two image-based platforms. I think that things between me and Instagram and Tumblr are serious - I might have found two keepers!