| THE EPISTOLARIAN |

Yesterday, I did a live session with my friend Alicia, who runs Marian Grace Design. We had planned it around a single heirloom, a pendant she designed from my lily of the valley seal. We met through a screen. Still, the heft of it came through intact.

After unboxing it, I fastened the chain and found myself lifting it again and again. I love how it brings me back to my hands, to the feeling of the pendant's weight, the smoothness of its back.

We spoke about making things meant to endure. She works in jewelry. I work in wax. The materials differ, but the expectation is the same. The object has to hold up to being handled, worn, kept for generations. It gathers meaning through its proximity to the human experience, through a kind of haptics, a language of touch that cannot be replicated through technology.

Alicia paused there. There was hope in that, in the idea that it returns. I tend to see it as happiness tinged by its earlier absence.

Throughout the day, I noticed how often my hand goes back to the pendant without thinking.

Most things now pass through our hands without asking much of us. It is rare to notice their texture at all.

A seal asks something of the moment. The wax must be melted to the right temperature, the stamp placed with care. Lift it too soon and the impression collapses. It requires timing, but not urgency.

This is how enduring things are made, through our attention and a willingness to remain in the physical world. Heirlooms have not survived out of sentiment alone, but because they continue to meet something constant in us. The outer world changes, sometimes beyond recognition, yet the inner world still asks what it always has: to be held, to be noticed even in the full weather of emotion.

We cannot go back. That much is clear.

If there is a return to happiness, it will be found going forward, in what we are willing to center, and whether we still know how to place human experience at the center of what we make.

The Hastings Étui

This week, the newest penny and étui rings will be released. They are offered first to étui collectors, making this the moment to reserve yours, if you have not already.

A New Work

The lighting makes this work difficult to capture, but in person it is striking. The elephant is rendered in a naturalistic palette, grounded and alive.

The piece is accompanied by a letter on the energetic nature of the elephant. In my visions, I have seen it placed within a gallery. It feels already on its way there, perhaps to the same Collector who acquires the Hopestill Horse.

The Framed Elephant also comes with #1/40 wax seal stamp.

Color of the Week: Neptune

Back in stock, a color drawn from the depths. Neptune is a richly saturated green with blue undertones, deeper than Zephyr, more oceanic than Caledonia.

Named for the Roman god of the sea, Neptune speaks to intuition, imagination, and the dissolving of boundaries. In myth, he ruled not only the ocean, but the emotional undercurrents of the world.

With love,

Kathryn