About

This is a tiny craft shop run by Helen Bell. I'm mostly a musician but I also make things and draw things.

For about seventeen years, I was a self-employed jewellery maker. My craft business constituted between 30 and 90% of my income at various times during this period. This all happened almost by accident: in 2005 I made some necklaces out of old buttons; friends said "you could sell those"; I bought a domain name and created some PayPal buttons and put some photos on a website; and because it was 2005 and there wasn't much internet yet, people started buying them literally a week later.

But turning a creative hobby into a job took its usual path, and I ended up having to semi-mass-produce things out of brand new materials in order to make it financially viable.

In early 2022, I gave up my dwindling craft business. There was an overcrowded market, virtually no traffic to my independent website, and the big tech companies controlling the handmade marketplaces were taking ever-bigger cuts and introducing new and more stringent rules. I was no longer enjoying any of it, and I'm very happy that I stopped.

However, I still like to make things sometimes, slowly and peacefully, out of old things and recycled materials and bits and pieces left over from other projects.