Stringing It Together

My name is Amy. I’m the Chief Visionary Officer and silversmith at Cowboy’s Sweetheart Jewelry and a children’s book author… or as I like to say, Boss Lady, Creative Outlaw, and Word Wrangler. I work out of a tiny, solar-powered, log shop in Gold Hill, Colorado.

I’ve been making things with my hands since I was a young girl… Jewelry, mostly. Starting out in the woods and on the coast of New England, rockhounding for stones, making my own beads, and stringing them together into something that felt—even then—like telling a story.

And though I didn’t have words for it at the time, it felt like it mattered.

After many years of making things, I‘ve learned that creativity isn’t a career choice, or a hobby. It isn’t something you’re either born with or you’re not.

Creativity is a way of life.

It’s how some of us make sense of the world—through our hands, through the materials, through the beautiful, painstaking, and sometimes extremely frustrating act of taking nothing and turning it into something.

For me, that something is jewelry.

But here’s the thing about jewelry:

Nobody needs it.

You can live a perfectly functional life without a single piece of jewelry. It won’t keep you warm. It won’t feed you. It serves no practical purpose whatsoever. And yet—humans have been adorning themselves with it for over 100,000 years. Why?

I believe it’s because jewelry isn’t really about jewelry.

To me it’s always been about the story…

The ring your mother wore every day since she married your dad. The “lucky” necklace you put on when you want to feel extra protection. The special bracelet you received when you accomplished an important, challenging life goal… and it makes you smile every time you glance down at your wrist.

Jewelry can be wearable memory. Wearable identity. Wearable courage even, sometimes.

So—whether you’re a maker, a creator, an entrepreneur, or someone who’s ever looked at what you do and wondered if it has meaning: It has meaning because it’s part of a story.

Your creativity isn’t frivolous… or small. The stories you tell through your work—whether it’s jewelry, or painting, or songwriting, or cooking, or whatever your hands do best—those stories connect us to each other in ways that no algorithm has ever figured out how to replicate.

People sometimes ask me what I do for a living. I tell them I make jewelry.

But what I’m really doing— what we’re ALL really doing here— is leaving tiny, expressive pieces of ourselves in the world. Those pieces can be strung together in meaningful ways that tell a bigger story, one greater than ourselves.

That’s not just craft. That’s connection. And it’s the whole reason we’re here.