I was born in the small mill town of Graniteville, South Carolina, and grew up clamboring about the sand hills and piney woods of South Carolina. I attended Winthrop College where I majored in English with a teacher's certificate and minored in Fine Art, with honors program in both subjects.
In the sixties, I moved west where I studied graphic design at the University of Utah and began a lengthy and rewarding career in advertising. By 1980 I was principal of an agency in New Mexico, designing award winning advertisements and publications.
After ten years of successful ad agency practice, I shifted to print production, magazine design and editing, eventually returning to an older love, writing. I took the full course of creative writing at University of New Mexico and wrote an as yet unpublished novel and numerous short stories.
I had been feeling the call to craft for a while. When I left my drafting table and ink pens for the magic of Word, Photoshop, Illustrator and Quark I had left something precious behind – direct manual contact with a tangible product.
Throughout my life, I had engaged happily in numerous crafts: sewing, crochet and knitting at my grandmother's side; a string of summer camp crafts and high school library projects; and after college study, experiments with drawing, painting, sculpture, linoleum cuts and printmaking. I enjoyed graphic enhancement in the advertising business: ink drawing, graphite and colored pencils, as well as photographic techniques. I took up macramÈ and metal stamped jewelry at one point and tried my hand at silver repousse. Curiously, it wasn't until I moved to Colorado in 1999 that I found beading.
Maybe it was waiting for me all along, to gain adequate patience, or to remember the childhood beauty of a craft without words. I continue to do many of the other things I've come to enjoy – design projects, poems and short stories, other artwork – but when I get up in the morning these days, it's to my beading table that I head.
I am continually learning new techniques, discovering new methods and creating new designs. I can't imagine a more wonderful way to spend my days.
About VirJen Mettle
VirJen Mettle is a sole proprietorship based in Grand Junction, Colorado. Its purpose is to study, produce and teach a selection of crafts and arts as well as the process of a crafted life. Like the guilds of old, VirJen Mettle considers all work as potential work on Self.
The VirJen Mettle logo is taken from the Egyptian hieroglyph for metal, specifically the metal gold, which is combined with another hieroglyph, the inverted arrow, which means to prove or accomplish. Every venture undertaken is a test of ability and commitment, and is, on a small scale, a reflection of our larger lives.
