Rubi Ace Designs, Ballarat (2026)

13/09/2026

🧌💎 THE GOBLIN HAS RETREATED TO THE CAVE. THE ADVENTURE IS OVER. FOR NOW.

A huge thank you to everyone who came to see me at the Ballarat Farmers Market , admired the hoard, rescued shiny treasures and encouraged this goblin's questionable life choices. ❤️

The goblin has returned to her cave to craft more loot, as every good goblin does.

Fortunately, it turns out the terrifying dragon circling the hoard had absolutely no intention of eating anyone or stealing my jewellery.

THE DRAGON JUST WANTED TO BE DOMESTICATED.

So obviously it has been adopted, given somewhere comfortable to sleep and several homemade vanilla and strawberry jam cookies.

The dragon is now happy.

The dragon is also extremely sticky.

🐉🍪

Meanwhile, LOTS OF LOOT WAS BLESSED BY THIS COMPLETELY SANE AND RESPONSIBLE GOBLIN.

Some treasures received EXTRA PROTECTION AGAINST MAN-CHILDREN, because certain pieces were considered particularly vulnerable to the ancient menace known as “men who should have grown up by now.”

The goblin takes her responsibilities seriously.

🧌✨

Unfortunately, there was still one final threat:

THE EVIL BUNNY WITH BIG SHARP TEETH.

Negotiations failed. Diplomacy failed. Common sense was never really an option.

So the GR***DE OF ANTIOCH was deployed.

Following the sacred instructions of the Book of Armaments, we counted:

ONE.

TWO.

THREE.

BOOM.

THE EVIL BUNNY HAS BEEN OBLITERATED.

AS IT WAS WRITTEN.

So the hoard is safe.

The loot has been blessed.

Some of it is protected from man-children.

The dragon has been domesticated.

The evil bunny has been dealt with according to sacred scripture.

And the goblin has retreated to the cave, surrounded by copper wire, gemstones and half-finished jewellery, contemplating the fact that she may have accidentally acquired a dragon.

Thank you to all you brave adventurers who stopped by, laughed, chatted and helped make today wonderfully chaotic.

Now there are pendants to make, bracelets to construct, shiny rocks to stare at, blessings to perform, man-children to ward off and...

A DRAGON TO FEED COOKIES.

🧌💎🐉🍪✨

THE GOBLIN HAS RETREATED. THE HOARD HAS SURVIVED.

UNTIL THE NEXT ADVENTURE.

11/09/2026

CHAROITE — CAROLIJA
There is singular moment when I stand upon precipice.
Behind me is forest, dark and restless. Somewhere among thorn bushes are beasts with large teeth invisible, but I hear rustling leaves, ocasional snap of twig. To me they are real and my frightened mind has given them teeth.
Before me is cliff with its endless drop. I grip edge with everything I have, because remaining where I am feels safer than leaping.
When I was young, I did not understand necessity of fear. I would run to the edge of Adriatic and leap into its smooth, glittering blue without calculating every possible consequence. I would climb out, laughing, and do it again. Sea was not a metaphor then but simply sea.
Age has strange way of filling the mind with possibilities. Older I become, more easily I can imagine everything that might go wrong. Remote danger becomes vivid; safe landing becomes abstract. Sometimes I find myself staring backwards at the forest instead of forwards at water.
Fear can become its own kind of captivity.
In my language there are words such as čarolija, magic, and začaran, enchanted. Charoite seems almost to whisper from same linguistic neighbourhood: stone whose violet surfaces resemble storm clouds breaking apart, darknes disolving into strange flashes of colour.
But I do not believe magic is something hidden inside stone, it is something we make, by deciding, despite beasts behind me, to leap and when I finally do, there is no forest, no teeth or calculating distance to bottom, but only impossible freedom of falling.
Rainbow-coloured clouds open beneath me, and I remember that I am allowed to exist somewhere beyond fear, held for brief moment by love and acceptance.
I return to my workbench: drawing left there by my children, new coffee mug, because apparently every new beginning requires one, little clay bird, made with such astonishing attention to detail that I could not help but smile.
Small things, ordinary things that somehow are magic.
Čarolija.
That is what this charoite pendant means to me: not that stone possesses magic, but that we do. We simply have to stop listening to forest long enough to jump.

10/09/2026

THINGS WE THINK WE SEE
We do not really see the world.
We see fragments of it. Light caught by eye, translated by brain, coloured by memory, expectation, fear and desire. We look at person, landscape, moment in our own lives, and believe that we are seeing reality, when we are only seeing the version our particular lens permits us to see.
I was thinking about this while working with this rainbow moonstone.
Stone does not reveal itself all at oncI turn it slightly and sudden electric flash of colour, little landscape of blue, gold and violet hiding inside pale stone appears. I turn it again and it disapears. Rainbow was always there, but I could not see it from where I was standing.
We are surrounded by things we cannot perceive: small kindnesses, beauty, pssibility, quiet courage of other people, ridiculous, improbable fact that we are here at all.
Sometimes we meet someone who helps us adjust the lens. They do not tel us what to see, but make us realise that our field of vision had become too narrow. For moment, darkness recedes and world becomes larger again.
More often, unfortunately, people can do the opposite, llittle cynicism here, llittle cruelty there, subtle digs, enough disappointment, repeated often enough, and lens contracts. Eventually we mistake darkness in our vision for nature of world itself.
I find myself looking for people at the fringes, slightly unreasonable ones who will still stop to pick up sparkly stone or a feather simply because it is beautiful, stick which will become sword to fight trolls and bugbears, people who have somehow retained that peculiar childhood ability to find wonder without requiring a respectable justification for it.
Somewhere between rainbows and unicorns, among meadows full of absurdly fluffy little bunnies, there is still perfectly sensible philosophy hiding in plain sight:
What we choose to notice changes the world we experience.
Helping someone else see little more light enlarges the world for us too.
This rainbow moonstone is small reminder of that, just stone, catching light.
For a moment, that is enough.

10/09/2026

WHEN RAIN COMES
There is something about rain that has always undone me.
I often watch it arriving across landscape, suddenly gathering speed, swoping in as though sky has finally lost patience with itself. Smell rises from the earth and something in me changes. I am returned, briefly, to more natural state of being, less defended, less burdened, belonging again to ordinary world of weather, stone, trees and water.
It takes me back to balcony of my childhood, overlooking Adriatic.
Couds would sink lower over the sea until they seemed almost to touch islands, great dark blanket drawn across the horizon. Southern wind would come hard against the coast and sea would answer with waves. Everything became darker and heavier, and then, strangely, more vivid.
Pine trees seemed sudenly alive. Bare limestone cliffs emerged in colours usually concealed beneath dust and summer heat. Whole landscape appeared washed clean.
I would run outside and let rain strike my face, soak my hair and run down my skin. I remember ridiculous excitement of it as though I could be washed free of accumulated dust, pain, obligations and endless pressures of being a person.
Perhaps that is why this piece of Australian chrysoprase caught me, without any promise or need to perform.
It is simply a beautiful piece of stone, with that particular green that seems to hold light differently: neither polished artificial green of something manufactured nor uniform green of a perfect landscape, but something more complicated and geological. There are variations, inclusions and quiet changes of colour that reveal themselves longer you look.
I wrapped it in bare copper, deliberately keeping the construction restrained so stone remains subject rather than becoming excuse for ornament.
We spend so much of our lives adding things: explanations, possessions, expectations, protections when sometimes better question is what can be left alone.
Stone. Copper. Rain.
And for moment, world is enough.

02/09/2026

Sublime Shadowdancer

Some days life becomes argument with existence. Cruelty is in discovering that world is not what we were taught to believe it was.
I was weaving earrings when I found myself thinking about Plato’s cave: people watching shadows upon wall, mistaking them for whole of reality. I naïvely believed that education, experience and willingnes to look carefully would eventually lead me into light.
Light is not simple as we imagine; not absence of darkness but it is having ability to see it. I discovered that world is not necessarily brighter but you simply see more of it. Beauty and cruelty ocupy same landscape. We consume in order to live; destroy in order to create; speak of morality while discovering how painfully expensive it is to insist upon it.
Wisdom is not seeing only light but it is learning to look directly at darkness without allowing it to become whole of what you see.
I discovered that kindness can be crushed beneath indiference; institutions can become enormous stone machines which consume letters, evidence, pleas and human suffering without ever learning names of those they grind beneath them.Doing what is morally right does not guarantee that anyone will stand beside you. I have spent unreasonable amount of time charging at institutions like Don Quixote at windmills: writing, questioning, insisting that people should do what is right simply because it is right. Walls do not even acquire ascratch.
Absurdity of being human is knowing windmill is windmill and charging at it anyway.
I cannot become indifferent.
At my bench Crazy Lace Agate stones seemed appropriate with surfaces that are landscapes of contradiction of delicate lines twisting into one another until certainty becomes impossible. No single line explains stone. Beauty exists in tension between them.
I allowed copper wire to follow rather than conquer stone which resulted in deliberately imperfect, elaborate, and wild, something that grew than something that was assembled.
I am still learning: that holding two truths at once does not mean choosing between them.
World is terribly broken but still beautiful
Making something beautiful is my small refusal to let darkness have

Rubi Ace Designs

13/09/2026

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