Jewelry Made by Happy Accident: The Art of the Unexpected

Jewelry Stories by Lisa-Marie Armstrong

Welcome to my Jewelry Stories. Works of Art can unexpectedly come into existence by happy accident. This piece in particular taught me more about intuition and patience than any perfectly planned design ever could.

Sometimes the pieces I love the most begin as something completely different. You would never know it, but some pieces began as a series of what my artist mind considers to be ‘mistakes’. This amethyst heart pendant is one of those stories.

It began its life as a ring – a ring I wasn’t sure about because I had just started making them and felt that this particular attempt had been a ‘fail’. So this ring was disassembled and ended up on an old watchband for reasons I can’t even remember anymore. I tried hard to convince myself that it was great. Eventually, when I finally gave in and decided I didn’t like it, I cut it off the watchband. (Which took forever, by the way.) For a long time, I looked at it and thought, Well… maybe I should put it down for awhile after the time I spent making back-to-back mistakes.

So it sat on my workbench. For months. Maybe even a year.

The slow evolution of a happy accident

Meanwhile, life was happening – kids, travel, inspiration arriving in waves – and this dismembered little piece simply waited. Then one day, with a bit of leftover clay and absolutely zero plan, I pressed it into a heart shape. No intention. No vision. Just a moment of spontaneous doing. After all, my mediums shouldn’t be wasted and this piece on my workbench looked like it could use something.

After that, it sat again.

A few months later, I was using some new paints and used it as my ‘test piece’. A few months after that, I used it to test some carving techniques that I was planning for another piece. More time passed, and I experimented with painting again – and once more, this little “mistake” became my test piece. It was never meant to be anything. It was just there, quietly collecting layers of my curiosity.

The moment I finally saw it

One morning, I walked into my studio and finally saw it. Really saw what it had become. This piece that had been sitting in front of me all along – this piece that had absorbed every experiment, every moment of play, every intuitive nudge.

In all of my testing, it had become the art.

It wasn’t a planned piece. It wasn’t one of the “official” ones. It was in it’s own special category of work.

So I gave it a chain. I tried it on. And in the end, I fell in love.

I had a good laugh with myself wondering how I didn’t see this piece earlier after I had done all of these things to it. It must have been my artistic tunnel-vision.

It has become a piece that I wear often and it reminds me that the path of art is often just like life- that mistakes are learning opportunities and that there is beauty in the imperfections- we just have pay a bit more attention.

The beauty of jewelry made by happy accident

After all, creativity isn’t always a straight line. Sometimes it’s a long, winding, messy, magical path… and sometimes the best pieces are the ones that were never meant to exist in the first place.

Wherever you are today, I hope you enjoy your own creative time – the planned parts and the accidental ones. They’re all part of the story.

If you’d like to see more of my sculptural pieces, please have a look in my gallery.

❤️

Lisa‑Marie