I am a storyteller and jewelsmith with decades of experience writing novels, articles and short stories, and making jewelry, crafts, fan art, tattoos, graphics and more.
I’ve sold my unique creations online since 2000, using eBay, Etsy and this website, and I’ve sold in-person at Illogicon, Escapist Expo, ConTemporal, ConCarolinas, Celtic Christmas and more.
My work is inspired by a lifelong love of myths, folklore, literature, music, art and history. I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s watching Star Trek, Conan the Barbarian, Time Machine (1960), Something Wicked This Way Comes, Time After Time, Return to Oz, Legend, Ladyhawke and many more, as well as reading tons of science fiction and fantasy. I frequently visited Disneyland’s Main Street penny arcade or Calico Ghost Town in the Mojave Desert.
By the age of 10, I’d built my own fortune teller and mechanical horse race contraptions out of cardboard, using toilet paper tubes to make gears and sprockets, and I turned electrical wire into bracelets and rings. Thus began my love of turning trash into treasure.
Like my Fallout characters, I scavenge and repurpose old, broken or discarded things. I use found items, broken vintage jewelry and other unusual materials in my creations, whenever I can. This makes each item a unique, serendipitous work of art.
In addition to jewelry, I sell other arts and crafts, as well as weird and wonderful items I find in thrift stores, yard sales and antique shops.
Though I’d used buttons, brass, leather and gears to make Victorian-inspired, Art Nouveau and found object jewelry for a long time, I didn’t hear the term “steampunk” until 2007. Sitting with a friend in an Irish pub, under a painting of W.B. Yeats, we discussed brass-and-copper, psuedo-Victorian, mechanistic, retro sci-fi motifs. I lamented that all my life I’d searched for some word to describe it.
My friend said, “I know the word. It’s steampunk.”
At that time, a Google search of “steampunk jewelry” didn’t turn up much and I found nothing on Etsy. I’m not claiming to be the first person to make and sell jewelry under the term “steampunk” but I was definitely one of the first.
In 2008, Jean Campbell invited me to contribute to the book Steampunk Style Jewelry (released in December 2009 with my projects on pages 50, 90 and 96). I’m also featured in 1000 Steampunk Creations, a 2011 book showcasing steampunk artists.
Since then, the word “steampunk” has taken on a life of it’s own. I love it but I’ve always been more interested in the source material — the art, history and literature of the actual Victorian, Civil War, Industrial Era, Art Nouveau, Belle Epoque and Wild West periods — rather than recent trends in anime, fashion, fiction and music.
Sometimes, I also make “spacepunk” jewelry inspired by science fiction, “screampunk” jewelry featuring macabre and occult elements, and “circuspunk” jewelry with a vintage carnival aesthetic.
When I’m not writing or making things, I play video games on YouTube and do a bit of geeky crafting on the JLHjewelry channel.
