Handmade Enamel Jewelry Lights An Individual Fire

Its practically an understatement, as the year 2009 reaches it halfway point in a few weeks, that America and indeed the entire world lives in changing times. With all the economic turmoil of late last year and the months of economic slowdown that preceded it, the current months and years ahead, for millions of us, seem only brighter by comparison.

We suggest that the times to come should not be about having the best or the biggest, conceptions that helped get us into our present economic straits. As we move farther into the 21st Century, we believe the time is right to reawaken our sense of the individual and renew our appreciation of the homemade. In particular, we believe for a myriad of social and political reasons the time has come to take special interest, and individuals and as a culture, of the benefits of handmade jewelry.

Appreciating the singular, rather than the standard

Just this week General Motors, the patriarch and best example of mass production, filed for bankruptcy, creating an economic vacuum in the city of Detroit that might never be filled again. The event sent tremors through the national financial news outlets and something like a low-key panic among hundreds of economic experts. After years of limping along with sluggish sales from a diffident public, and faced with staggering competition from foreign car makers, the corporate monolith gave up the ghost, appealing to the already strained federal government for protection.

General Motors, along with the Ford Motor Company, presided itself on its devotion to the idea of mass production for close to a century. To be fair, the ability to mass produce automobiles was an inestimable boon to our nation and its economy. But the collapse of GM in its own dramatic way highlights a shift in consumer perspective. Rather than having what everyone else has, the trend now shifts towards having something thats unique. Why buy a CD when you can create your own MP3 playlists? Why read commercial fiction when you can publish your own online magazine?

The dawning of personalized, individualized tastes and products

The art and craft of handmade enamel jewelry involves taking many different designs of a similar theme but approaching each finished product as a separate and unique creation from even the jewelry piece created immediately before and after it. In creating handmade enamel jewelry, the artisan works with a variety of materials and motifs, sculpting, painting, and tooling many difficult ingredients to create a distinctive creation thats literally a work of art.

Handmade jewelry artists like most artists - often draw their inspiration from their own spiritual studies and their life experiences. As a result, the shopper for handmade enamel jewelry really only needs to find a handmade enamel jewelry craftsman with a similar worldview or understanding of spirituality. Of course, its also entirely likely the customer will use their new jewelry to expand their own spiritual horizons, as well, bringing an additional value to their jewelry purchase.