Custard
I will not dilly-dally. I will not beat around the bush. Let me get down to it and show you last week’s bake.
As promised, we made creme brûlées last Friday to celebrate Custard Week on Bake Off. Eric already has a method he likes, centered around making them in the Instant Pot (because it’s practically effortless and they come out perfect every time), so our only change to the usual recipe this time around was that I melted the sugar on top using a butane torch instead of the broiler. While this alternate method produced a caramel that was less even, aka less pretty, it still had that lovely, signature crack when tapped with a spoon. And once we got to tasting, discussions of aesthetics were all but forgotten.
This week, I also made jewelry. I felt good, it felt like time, and I wanted to get back into the swing of things with something familiar - so I picked up my tools and created something for myself as a way to close out this decade of my life. Without actually looking back through photos and posts, I think this may be the first piece I’ve finished since March. Which is crazy.
The design I settled on felt like the obvious choice - a turquoise Pines. I made so many of these over the years - as necklaces, as rings - but I never kept one for myself. I meant to, often wanted to, but also always had the sense that those pieces weren’t mine. And so they went out into the world and I waited to see if one from the next batch had my name on it.
Now, before I go on I need to explain something. And that something is the strange way that making something for yourself and making something for work are not the same thing. SO many times over the years, I’ve had people sigh and say I must LOVE making art for a living - and while it has been incredibly rewarding, it is not a life of rainbows and unicorns. It’s hard. For better or worse, the mindset I have when I sit down to knit or sew or draw is very different from the mindset I have when I sit down at the jeweler’s bench.
After so much time away, I had hoped that a good amount of the intensity I’d been feeling around my jewelry making would have shriveled and once again returned to a state of fertile, creative earth - ready to grow anew. But, alas, it was more like all that angst was just lying dormant, like some noxious weed waiting to sprout the minute I picked up my saw.
I can’t imagine you’re here, reading this, in the hopes that I’ll spend paragraphs and paragraphs moaning and complaining so I’ll keep this brief : simply holding my tools and working with metal had me frustrated. Anxious. Restless. It was classical conditioning at its finest - after years of putting too much pressure on myself, my brain immediately put me in crisis mode when I sat down to work.
The emotion that most surprised me, though, was anger. Deep, bitter, brittle, anger. And I had to make the choice of whether to walk away or to GO AT IT. I chose the latter.
Instead of just making a Pines pendant, I committed to making the chain, too. I’ve long wanted to make a chain of forged links - the shapes of the little pieces remind me of bones or feathers or the crumbling leaves on a dried sprig of mountain sagebrush - and I can’t help but be drawn to that bright fluttering. Making chain is a beast, though - a time eating, mind maddening, tedious beast. And this chain is especially tough to get even. So I’ve never done it. Never tried it. But, I figured, if I was going to spend some time sorting through my mental garbage I might as well have something to show for it at the end.
When I’m working through a problem, any problem, Eric likes to call up the imagery of a duck swimming on a pond. On the surface, that duck just floats and glides - ripples streaming out smoothly behind. Beneath the water, though, those feet paddle MADLY. This was like that.
I did not listen to music or podcasts. Did not put on a movie in the background. Oh no - instead I let my thoughts and fears and practiced mentalities rage and roil beneath the calm mask of my face and the practiced facade of my hands. The first half of the chain took forever and felt like some kind of torture. But the third quarter went more smoothly. By the time I reached the last few links, I didn’t feel like my outside appearance was at odds with what I was feeling on the inside.
Hours and hours passed - for reference, each link took between fifteen and twenty minutes to craft. And by the time I was putting the final polish on the Pines settings? That fire had just burned itself out. Burned itself clean. Left me not hollow, but instead with space to continue relearning how to be in this medium.
