Barracuda Handmade Gift Co.
Exploring new designs, materials and techniques to create designer and bespoke gifts for you.
handmade jewellery and gifts
What I do
I create and retail my own handmade designs, and work with clients to bring to life completely unique pieces, tailored to their tastes or those of their loved ones for whom they are looking for that special gift.
Being unreasonably mesmerised by the natural aesthetics of driftwood - rounded, barkless sections bleached almost grey by the sun - I also use woodburning techniques to create gifts using hand-collected, local driftwood, with special messages, names, dates, coordinates, whatever you can imagine, immortalised on this special and extremely well-travelled natural material.
Fine but who am I?
A question I often ask myself, having not achieved childhood ambitions like being a whale fancier or in fact a permanent contestant on The Crystal Maze (genuine ambition) how was I going to define myself?
I largely had this decided for me by high school peers, but 'weirdo who draws horses that wear glasses' didn't sit well. I was an arty kid but school art class had turned me off and killed my creativity.
At the end of the character-building gauntlet of fielding sarcasm that is high school, I took a 3-day taster course in silversmithing. Symbolically, two tiny silver rings made there stayed on my thumbs to this day, reminding me that there could be more to this.
Now a trained silversmith, I use traditional techniques and skills gained during a series of evening classes at Plymouth College of Art and Design to design and create handmade jewellery with personality.
A shameless beachcomber, wanderer and craft-seeker, I supplement a full time, computer-based career with my creative pursuits, where my aim is to make people feel good about what they adorn themselves with, what they gift and what they receive.
What's with the fish?
In 2017 in my search for brand identity, I created the Barracuda logo you see here, my Etsy shop, Facebook page and Instagram page. Barracuda are large and menacing-looking fish at the outset; toothy, narrow, definitely not cute right? Not something you want on your team.
The angry barracuda, solitary and rigid, roams the tropical seas, quietly enjoying the warmth of the water and the sun near the surface.
Past the grasses and the coral reef, slinking over a mixture of sand and pebbles, the barracuda locks eyes on a shiny trinket on the sea bed; diving at a hasty 27mph it snags and admires it - a ring made of a piece of aqua sea glass - at the end of a long, pointed snout (you've seen my photo, draw whatever parallels you will).
The barracuda arched its back with glee and beamed, like no predatory fish ever had (romantic eh?), totally in love with the moment of finding this trinket, made from glass beautified by the action of the sea.
