Lydia is my name, Lyd for short, and crafts are my joy.  Well, along with writing and research, but I’m here to talk about crafts. I grew up in a family that enjoyed making things with their hands.  My dad used to do carpentry work in the garage until we moved into the city and my mom has fabric and pattern around her sewing machine in the attic.  Holidays were always fun as my mom made chocolate candies by hand as well as cookies and the occasional cake when she wanted to try a new recipe.  I learned early on that anyone could go to a store and get a DVD or toy for someone for a gift but not many people bothered to make handmade cards or scrapbooks or jewelry for friends and family.  Not only is the giving so much sweeter when I made the gift by hand, but the process of seeing an item in my head form in my hands is an amazing process.

I started making jewelry, or at least collecting beads in my early teens, about the time I started to learn embroidery (which I never was good at) but I never really focused on making jewelry as more than an occasional hobby until about a year ago when I decided to open a store on Etsy.  It took a while until I thought I had some good pieces to put up and I opened my store on New Years Eve, 2011.  Mostly my items were wirework and stone but I quickly realized I wanted other techniques to play around with as well.

I was feeling rather blocked when thinking about what to make for my Etsy store, Lydia’s Magical Kingdom.  I realized that I don’t have a lot of experience with different techniques so I thought I’d try new techniques and make samples not designed to be sold in my store.  Well, I wasn’t comfortable putting half finished experiments and cheap finished products on my shop blog and my aunt has been bugging me for a while to put up pictures of the things I’ve made so I thought I’d start a new blog.  Here I’ll talk about, and hopefully show you, my current projects and the techniques I’m trying, both for my jewelry making and for the fun of learning a new technique as well as show you interesting things I discover on the internet such as other people’s creations and stores I like as well as books I use.

I hope you enjoy my creations and feel free to contact me if you have any ideas you want to put up here.