…handcrafted in and inspired by the Olympic Peninsula

Soon after we moved to Dungeness, Washington and started these studios, we discovered yet another facet of life near the water. This was one that neither of us had ever had to live with before and therefore had no first hand experience with…the wind. It doesn’t blow all the time but boy when it does…
Instead of trying to fight this unwanted and yet inevitable guest we decided to try to embrace it. Hence “the wind rocks”were born.
They were originally designed to be made with driftwood. But the shapes were all wrong for the look and feeling we were after and by the time the driftwood was large enough to have the structure needed it was way too big for the rocks. The answer was to change the material the “arms” were made of and get more control of the nuances in the shapes. We wanted the “arms” to reflect the shapes we saw in the waves, feathers, and grasses that were in the beach rocks original habitat.  My experiences in the blacksmith’s arts from my classes at the National Ornamental Metals Museum were to come into play.  I was able to forge the shapes from steel and solid copper which both “aged” with beautiful patinas of cinnamon and verdigris.  Watching these mobiles drift in the space between the bottom of a tree and the top of the garden is not at all unlike watching a fire gentle flicker through the night.  I image at times I can almost hear the beach rocks in the mobile laughing at their sisters still bound to the earth.

Another garden implement that we have recently developed is a simple but elegant “hose guard” that helps prevent the garden hose from being dragged across delicate plantings. Here we used a common theme found on beaches around the world, the rock cairn. We first develope a pleasing stack of beach rocks, much like you would have done at the shore.  Then we drill a hole through the center of each rock and then run long steel rods through the center of the stack. Only the very top beach rock is attached to the steel rod.  This allows the hose to guide across the stack spinning the other stones on the same rod that keeps the stack securely in place in the ground.

Please visit http://coffeesjewelry.blogspot.com/ and go to the posts in August of 2009 to see a video of the hose guards working.