5 Books that Inspired My Jewelry Designs This Year — Fantasy, Craft & Storytelling

I've always read the way some people collect things, getting lost in the story with true immersion. The detailed imagery, deep character connection and the deep twisting politics of a fictional world that somehow lodges itself in your mind and refuses to leave.

When I'm designing jewellery, I dig deep into those lodged references and pull out shapes, colours, or obscure detailed borders that reference a long lost group of people and let them flow into my work.

I often find myself returning to some of my cult classic favourites as they captured my imagination so deeply and so I thought I would share my favourites with you, hoping to inspire you too!

WARNING: Some spoilers are present in my notes.

The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan

Rereading this felt like returning to somewhere I'd been a long time ago and realising I'd grown since the last visit. My husband first introduced me to this series when we started dating over 20 years ago, when I was still in college and forming who I am.

What stayed with me this time was the cycling of it. Time turning, lives reborn, patterns repeating until something finally shifts. I kept finding myself drawn to circular forms while designing this year, with repeating patterns and heavily on ring shapes. I have always loved the concept of a shape that never ends but just keeps going round in a new cycle.

The Mythborn series by Brandon Sanderson

Sanderson's cosmos universe is relentless in political struggle, betrayals and unique magic systems. The characters who fall completely apart and then slowly put themselves back together resonates with the making process in a way I find hard to explain to people who haven't worked with metal. 

You start with something raw, apply heat, you reshape it - sometimes multiple times, until it becomes what it was always meant to be. The chaos is part of it.

When I'm working with stones that seem to hold light from the inside, kyanite, labradorite, citrine, I think about that. Finding brightness through the difficult parts!

The Liveship Traders by Robin Hobb

Nobody writes about craft and emotion the way Robin Hobb does. Her ships are built from wood that absorbs memory and becomes sentient through exposure to the people who love them, grieve on them and live their whole lives aboard them.

I think about that a lot in relation to handmade jewelry. Every piece I make carries something of the moment it was forged: my mood, the music I was listening to, whatever I was turning over in my mind that day. It's all in there somehow, preserved in the metal and when someone wears it, that travels with them.

This trilogy reminded me that imperfection is evidence of a human hand, the piece remembering how it was made.

Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

I've loved this book since I was young and I keep coming back to it.

It's about enchanted objects and things that aren't what they appear to be on the surface. A castle that moves, a fire that speaks, a plain grey cloak that turns out to be extraordinary. Magic that lives inside ordinary-looking things and only reveals itself slowly to the right person.

That feels very close to what I'm trying to do with jewelry. A piece that looks simple until the light hits it a certain way. A stone that seems quiet until you've worn it long enough to notice what it does to how you feel. Sophie spends most of the book not realising what she's capable of and I think a lot of the women who wear my pieces are a bit like that too. Their magic was already there.

The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

No creative list of mine is complete without at least one dragon.

What I love about Priory is its duality of radiant gold alongside deep shadow, women shaping their own legacies on their own terms. The idea that strength and beauty aren't opposites so you don't have to choose between them.

When I reach for bold gemstones or mixed metals, I think of this. How much can coexist in a single piece when you stop trying to make it only one thing?

Art doesn't exist in isolation, I think. Every design carries traces of the stories that shaped it, both the ones I've lived and the ones I've borrowed from other worlds entirely.

These five reminded me to dream bigger, work slower and trust that the feeling always finds its form eventually.

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