Nancy Lee Designs: Handmade Metal Jewelry, Objects, and Instruction

INDIANAPOLIS -

The holiday season is an important time for retailers, a time that can make the difference between a profit or loss for the year.

The same is true for local, small businesses and a new website is designed to make it easier to find and support them.

Tucked away in a tiny workshop, Nancy Lee sees the beauty in scrap pieces of copper, aluminum, clock gears – even bullets.

“I’ve been doing all sorts of arts and crafts since I was really a little, little girl,” said Lee. “I even did a beautiful woven necklace with played violin strings.”

She pounds and saws away, making pieces that rival those in the finest, big name jewelry stores and even has a little gallery. But she sure doesn’t rival big name advertising budgets.

“I would love to be able to be located by people who are looking for handmade works,” she said.

So she made a profile on Thumbtack.com. The name for Thumbtack came from the way people advertise offline. The founders wanted to build an online bulletin board, where anyone can thumbtack their service.

It is not a new idea, but the founders in San Francisco say they separate themselves by including only businesses that have chosen to sign up, letting you say what service you need, getting several local bids within 24 hours and putting each service through a 12-step verification process.

“That makes me feel good that I am amongst other people who have also been verified, so that kind of raises everyone up,” Lee said.

There are 2,000 Indianapolis businesses on Thumbtack so far, of all kinds. You can even hire a Santa Claus if you need one.

A local personal shopper and moving company listed on the site say they just wish more people knew about it. You can search Thumbtack for free, but businesses have to sign up to be a part of it and it can cost them to be part of the bidding process.

The best part of what I do is to help people bring their dreams to life in metal. Recently I had an opportunity to create jewelry for a special occasion within my own family – a 25^th anniversary memento. But I was coming up dry…

The story begins with my younger sisters’ college graduation. She moved from home base in Central Illinois to a suburb of Chicago. A few months after she got settled, our mom decided a visit was in order, and invited my older sister and me to accompany her.  That was November, 1986.

Our visits since then have encompassed trips to Urgent Care, the ER, post surgical care, stories of marriages and children, dinner, deaths, lunches, brunches, cookies and Cosmos, and before you could say John Robinson, twenty-five years had passed.  To my metalsmith’s mind, a journey this terrific deserved a commemorative piece of jewelry!

With weeks turning into days, I hadn’t come up with an idea I was excited about. But that night, just as I was preparing for bedtime, an image of interlocking rings appeared to me. This was it! I quickly sketched it out and fell asleep.

The night before I was to leave, I started on the intertwining circle pendant. Four pendants to be exact: one for my mother, my two sisters, and me. At the bench, our story unfolded in my hands.  Sixteen circles lay before me, each soldered into an individual, perfect round shape. But something was missing. Life! I grabbed my two-pound forging hammer and tapped dings and dents into each of the rings – bumps along life’s path.

Cut open again, the circles were then able to be linked into groups of four rings and soldered. One ring for each of us, four rings per pendant. No matter what happened we would always be welded together. The following morning, I added a triangular shaped cubic zirconium gemstone inspired by our mom, mother of three daughters, the spark that created us and keeps us together. No time to make a chain, so I threaded each pendant onto a length of white satin ribbon. Packed in tiny handmade paper boxes and little gift bags, I started my journey to Illinois.

That evening, we broke from tradition and had an impromptu dinner at my sister’s kitchen table. Gifts were busted out, and I am pleased to say that the pendants were a hit, sparking stories and emotions that will live with each of us for a very long time. Hopefully, forever!

Meeting with girlfriends is a wonderful thing, especially when your girlfriends are astute business women. A recent meeting with two wonderful such women left me reinvigorated and with a purpose – to revise my business plan. Back at my office, I went to work…and remembered that my business plan no longer existed. Stolen last year about this time, along with my laptop, never to be seen again. Curiously, while searching for it, the following blog post I wrote after Thanksgiving (2010) showed itself. The post talks about living in gratitude, and some steps to do that. How did I do with those steps? Read on…results are at the end of the post.

Custom Amethyst Ring

Like many Americans, I have spent the last few days gorging on delicious food, spending time with friends and family, and generally being grateful for what I have. And trying like heck to NOT focus on what I don’t. Hoping and trusting you were able to do the same thing.

Paired with that thankfulness has been the loss of my business computer AND backup hard drive, and dealing with the doldrums during the aftermath. Without going into the gory details, let’s just say I type this from ground zero. There exists a certain nervous energy surrounding starting over, technology wise. On the one hand, it’s great having a new computer. While I’m all gaga about getting it whipped into shape so it can take care of me and my bidness, I don’t want to backslide into “reaction mode” regarding the loss of my entire virtual world of technology and the slog of recreating it from scratch. So, Monday marks a new, important week of moving forward into creativity, even if it’s in tiny steps! Interestingly, my inspiration is not wrapped in a shiny new package of magic tricks. Right now I need comfort and familiarity. My focus is on a tender mashup of five little tools in the creativity kit already at my disposal.

1.      Meditate – even though it’s not done in a true Zen way (I mean, who can sit like that?) I do plan on sitting for at least 15 minutes and visualizing nothingness. Doing nothing clears a path.

2.       Write – since this summer, I’ve kept a dream journal. I write in it a lot, and often take extra time to look up my dream symbols in The Dreamer’s Dictionary: Translations in the Universal Language of Mind by Barbara Condron. It’s been deeply helpful and brings me a kind of secret powerful joy that I’m getting to know the workings of my dream-brain better (say that three times fast).For example, last night I dreamt of dozens of cooing babies floating before me as I swaddled them in soft translucent netting cloth, wove the cloth with satin ribbons, tied the ribbons into bows, and then folded the cloth down and around the babies like the petals on a flower. Happy-happy joy-joy. In the dream book, babies are new ideas. Coolness.

3.       Listen to music that makes me feel like dancin’ just for the fun of it.

4.       No TV. Sitting there staring at that cube really sucks creative motivation out, like totally!

5.       Be grateful – each night, 5 things I’m grateful for will be listed in my gratitude journal. This gets me thinking of gratitudes during a regular day, and noticing with joy the things I’ll be able to write down later. WOOT! SCORE ONE FOR GRATITUDE!

The results of moving forward? Pretty good, I must say. All five items got great attention for weeks after that 2010 Thanksgiving. The first to fall, though, was no TV. So I like reruns of The Office! Of all the tools, writing has been the one thing that has gotten regular, dedicated attention.

The Business Plan will be reinvented. But just as important, re-dedication to the now-revised list will be key: Meditate Write, and Be Grateful. Simple and easy. The Business Plan, therefore, will be simple and easy. That’s my intention.

P.S. Thank you, Jeryl and Jenny, my great girlfriends!