About the Maker

I've often dreamed of having a shop one would stumble upon in an Elder Scrolls or D&D game. You know the kind - creepy yet welcoming, filled with wondrous and unsettling items, and occupied at all hours by an eccentric, sometimes cantankerous proprietor.

I've always enjoyed making stuff, mostly by giving new life and purpose to existing, often discarded, objects. I hesitate to call it art or upcycling. I'll let you decide if it's that. But years of scale model making, kit-bashing, scratch-building taught me to see new potential in everyday things. Soon, I had all kinds of props for roleplaying games or movie sets. I gave them backstories. They became artifacts.

I began making jewelry about ten years ago. My lifelong love of mineral specimens and gemstones led me to working almost exclusively with natural materials. I have evolved from the purist I once was and have come to appreciate the juxtaposition of the naturally-occurring with the human-wrought, again imbuing each object with a backstory so that it becomes an artifact.

For years, my wife and my friends have been telling me I should open my own shop. I shied away for many reasons, but I'm one of the many millions of folks whose life was upended by the pandemic and so, as a light begins to dimly appear at the end of this long tunnel, I hope for my little shop of artifacts to emerge at the other end and make you wonder whether you've stepped into a dream.

I live in Long Beach, CA with my lovely wife, three lovely teenage children, one verminociter, three felines, one ancient tortoise, and one creature of the fey who many mistake for a Sphynx. I'm pretty sure he's at least part goblin or part imp.