Growing up in a house in the middle of a junkyard in the middle of a small town in the middle of Michigan, I had a difficult time understanding why other kids didn't have rusty school buses to play in or why their moms didn't know how to drive a forklift. My sister and I often amused ourselves by making bracelets out of O-rings (it was the 80's after all) or spelling out our names on wax paper with industrial liquid silicone. We were pretty, pretty junkyard princesses. Pretty princesses that knew how to rebuild an engine before we even had our drivers licenses.

Jumping forward nearly two decades I had graduated from art school, moved to Seattle and was working as a graphic designer. One day while sitting at work, I realized I missed the excitement of digging through my dad's latest auction finds or using powertools. That's when the idea for Junkyard Jewelry arose. I enrolled in a jewelry making workshop soon after. The first hour of class we used a torch, a vice, a rolling mill and banged on metal with a hammer. I was 8 years old again and giggling. In retrospect, I'm pretty sure I was the only one in that class who picked up a torch and had happy childhood flashbacks.

My dad's junkyard still exists although there are trees growing through a lot of the car shells and the roof to his workshop collapsed in 2007. I try to acquire most of my Junkyard Jewels from my dad's yard. Partially because it's the epicenter for the concept of Junkyard Jewelry, but mostly because I love holding up a beautiful, rusty hunk of metal, brushing it off and asking the wind "What the heck is this?" only to have my mother answer "That's a ball bearing from a 1951 8N Ford tractor."