It’s an honor to bring WEST back to life with this magical collaboration featuring the talents of three inspiring boss babes – Ore + Wool’s Tarah Boyd, Delevo Design‘s Deborah Vogt and photography by Emily Cummings.
This year has been a beast. Professional expansion, personal purging, loss, success and rewriting my own narrative by evaluating what deep, enduring happiness means to me. My sense of time has been accessed and redistributed, much of which has been taken away from the screen to focus on tangible, spiritual and, well, human connectivity. Hence, this blog and social media have taken a slight back seat, and for good reason, I’m now pumped and re-inspired to be back with a fine-tuned focus: independent brands spearheaded by inspiring individuals who are paving the way with sustainable, slow and ethically-sourced designs.
The three women I’m featuring here are multi-talented, multi-tasking, self-made creators who are redefining womanhood in their own inspiring ways. Today, we really can have it all. It ain’t easy, it takes bravery and a no-shits stance against old boxes of being, but I’m grateful to be alive and female now more than ever with ladies like these to look up to and create with.
I met Ore + Wool founder and fibre artist Tarah Boyd at a hotel in Reno while decompressing after Burning Man a couple of years ago. I first noticed her in the check-in line and remember thinking what a badass she seemed to be, still dusty from the playa, a child in one hand (also dusty), the other hand directing her partner on some task – she was clearly, calmly running the show. The family of three were in matching white cotton ensembles that made all other Burners including myself look like matted muppets who forgot how to dress while in the wormhole.
After awkwardly ogling Tarah and her family I learned she was an entrepreneur, artist and bonafide cool chick over drinks later that night.
Her original, woven wallhangings like this featured copper weaving with creamy white wool are ethically-sourced, non-mulesed and made of merino wool. The copper is salvaged and recycled and each weaving is smudged with Palo Santo before shipping to ensure “the purest energy,” she said. Garnering techniques from weaving and macrame, she views herself “as more of an artist than a label, pulling much inspiration from nature (specifically patterns found in nature) and from the experience of being a mother,” she explained. In candid real talk I just love, she says weaving is also “just meditative as fuck and is my naturally occurring therapy.” Yup.
Deborah Vogt aka Delevo aka the crafty sorceress behind Delevo Designs Jewelry has been a dear friend and creative collaborator for years. This jet-setter has been selling her unique designs across the globe for years and just opened her first brick and mortar store in Bali. I love this woman. I don’t know too many people that exude such genuine enthusiasm like Deb, especially when she talks about gems. It’s contagious and makes you want to learn everything under the sun about the healing properties and superpowers behind the precious stones. She’s also the fierce frontwoman behind Delevo and the Early Bird Circus.
I’ll be featuring a lot of her work in upcoming posts, but I thought her stunning lunar compass necklaces were a fitting match to Tarah’s dreamy copper weaving, both celebrating divine femininity as inspired through the natural world. Delevo’s lunar compass necklaces are “based on an old nautical map of the moon’s path around the Earth” and are “handcrafted from .925 sterling silver, brushed and set with nine gemstone moons orbiting the Earth,” she said. The necklaces come in three different sizes (I stacked two) and a variety of stones including labrodorite, moonstone, turquoise, topaz, larimar, lapis and opal.
Emily Cummings is yet another magical, multi-faceted Renaissance woman. I first met her on a Downtown LA rooftop where she was leading a workshop on all things I love: flora, yoga and weed. We reconnected recently and bonded over photography, spiritual healing and being LA natives which naturally led to this photoshoot.
Emily is an inspiration. By the time she was 18, she was a professional ballerina dancing with both The San Francisco Ballet and The Joffrey Ballet. She quit after chronic injury and healed herself through yoga, which she now teaches at Set & Flow Hollywood, Hot 8 Yoga Sherman Oaks, Evoke Yoga DTLA and Samarasa Echo Park. She also created her own unique teaching style known as Body Language “based around the idea that our bodies each have an individual story to tell, and so much to teach us about ourselves if we are willing to listen,” she said. Emily also teaches amazing workshops and is a photographer and creative director.
For my part, I sprinkled some celestial graphic magic to these images captured at Griffith Park. I look forward to featuring more inspiring individuals and their creations with you soon. As always, thank you for your continued support.
♡☆♡☆♡☆
Arielle