Photo by Justin Heininger : Cuff Bracelet by Justin Heininger
This week is fast and loose people. It’s the day after I normally post this, so I’m going to hop-to and write a stream of consciousness here.
Also, I wanted to make a correction from my last newsletter (and updated on my website) that I stopped cooking for Nectar’s in 1996, not 2006. 1996 is the year I originally came up with the business name Beneath the Mountains and registered that name as a sole proprietorship with the State of Vermont.
Questions Answered
Where did your artistic journey begin? (Part 12 - Starting Beneath the Mountains)
I wanted to go back and write a little more about moving in with my grandfather and my experiences in regard to that. Some of this will be a recap for anyone who read part 11.
Living with my grandfather was a little strange for me. He was kind enough to me. I probably was a bit too cocky, though I did my best to be polite and respectful. I was 23 after all. It worked well enough most of the time, I guess. Cooking at Nectar’s that summer (1996) kept me pretty busy and I honestly didn’t really see my grandfather a whole lot between working in the bar and going out to bars with friends.
My father had expressed concern about grandfather’s health and well-being, which had partly swayed me into moving in with him. I didn’t want to be in a position where I had to take care of him. I did see potential to start a small silversmithing business. I wanted to clean up a few rooms in the house and see if I could make jewelry to sell and make a living doing it.
So the monumental effort began that summer, after all my stuff was moved into one room, to poke around, and figure out how much stuff was around the house (some rooms were completely cluttered with boxes of the stuff humans seem to attach themselves) I could manage to safely clean out and get rid of stuff that was clearly trash. After that my plan was to set up a space for a small metals studio. I finally settled on two areas of the house.
The first area was a room on the second floor at the back of the house which had a sliding glass door and a small deck beyond. It didn’t look like it had been accessed in a while, as the seemingly dead plants attested to. (I brought several of the spider plants back from the brink.) There was also a small staircase leading up to the uninsulated attic.
I made it my goal to begin in that room so that I could sit on the deck and enjoy a beer. Later on, I grew hops in the backyard and strung them up to the deck, where they happily grew right up to the top railing of the deck. It was a great place to begin as I accomplished three things at once–unblocking the deck door, unblocking the attic door, and creating a summer outdoor space to soak in the sun. It also meant that I had a small reason to not work on the other promising area of the house, the basement.
The basement was full of stuff as well. It was an old stone basement and was a bit damp. With help and guidance from my father, I slowly began moving things around and cleaning other areas so that I could set up a workbench, lighting, a small ventilation system, and a place under it to do silver brazing. There were hundreds of pounds of stone to move around and a fairly large stone saw, in addition to storage drawers for slabs of cut stone and even some stone that had been turned into cabochons.
Stone? Yep.
You see, my grandfather was a member of the Burlington Gem and Mineral Club. It was a hobby of his that he had taken up at some point in his life. I think between having served in WWII as a front line medic, and coming home and continuing to practice medicine as a general practitioner, learning about and working with gems and minerals was a calm and soothing experience for him. That’s what I am imagining now, anyway. I never had the nerve to ask him too many questions about his life and he didn’t really talk a whole lot. (My talkative nature definitely did not come from that side of the family.) I did use some of the cabochons he had made though, three of which are part of a bracelet that I've worn for over 25 years now.
There was one time I came home with just enough beer in me that I sat down and carefully worked up the nerve to ask him about the war. I expressed my curiosity and asked him if he ever talked about it.
“No.”
[I paused as I carefully tried to figure out a question that he might be willing to answer]: “Was there anything you remember fondly about any of it? Maybe being in England before going to mainland Europe?”
He gave me a bit of an annoyed look, “not really.”
My 23 year old brain floundered and out burst a question about one of the things I was most interested in at that age, “Well, most Englishmen would have been on mainland Europe when you were there. Were there any pretty girls around?”
He looked at me. A corner of his mouth rose a little, possibly a small smile, “oh, I guess.”
That was basically the end of the conversation. I wasn’t going to press for gory details of the war that he didn’t want to share and I certainly didn’t want to pester him. Even with the beer fortified boldness, I wasn’t going to coerce him and I certainly didn’t want to make him mad.
I kept working on cleaning the basement.
After many months and lots of research I managed to figure out how to register my Sole Proprietorship with the State of Vermont in addition to getting a sales tax license. Now, keep in mind that not many people had computers and the internet was not terribly useful for doing any of these things efficiently at the time. (Some people had computers but it may have been 25% of people - I have no data, this is a guess.) Which meant I had to go, in person, or call, often followed by going in person, to City Hall, State of Vermont Offices, the library, talking to people I knew, to get everything setup. Even after I figured out what to do, I still needed to write up forms and then mail them with any required fees.
It was extremely time consuming.
I did manage to get it all done though, eventually, sometime during the summer of 1996.
That’s when I began talking to Nectar about trying what I wanted to do. As you may recall from Part 11, I stayed on as a cook while Nectar took a trip to see family in Greece. When he returned, I helped do a bit of training, and then my time as a cook ended.
Fun side note:
At one point after I stopped cooking for Nectar’s, I sat down and made a very conservative estimate on the number of turkeys I had cooked during my 2 years of part time and 2 years of full time work there. It came out to be at least 2000. That’s a lot of turkey!
By the time I was ready to begin anew, it was October.
The first few weeks were very slow going. I wasn’t really sure what I should do first. I didn’t even really have any designs to make. I’m pretty sure I started by drawing ideas. Then I slowly began to make a few things.
Then something unexpected happened. About 2 weeks after I had stopped working at Nectar’s, I met someone. At Nectar’s.
Now that may not sound unusual, especially if you grew up well before internet dating, but it was for me. You see, all through college, and for the following two years after I graduated, I never had a girlfriend. I had a few dates, but nothing serious. It wasn’t unusual for me to get the, “I don’t want to date you, we’re friends!” Ugh.
So on a slow (Sunday?) night when nothing was really happening around Burlington and I was feeling a bit lonely and gloomy, I saw someone interesting across the room. As I began to walk away, figuring I would get rejected (it seemed plausible given the state of affairs at the time) something strange came over me and I heard a distinct voice tell me, “go ask her for a hug you idiot, the worst thing that will happen is you’ll get told no!” For some reason, being told no didn’t seem like such a big deal at that moment. After all, I’d be able to call it night and take my disheartened attitude home if that happened.
Except. That didn’t happen.
After being scrutinized thoroughly, from head to toe, I got a hug. The hug turned into a conversation. The conversation turned into drinks and even some dancing, if I recall correctly. Eventually the bars all closed.
Three years later, I was married to my best friend and wife.
Now this may seem slightly irrelevant, except for one thing. About four to six weeks later, and several more dates, I decided I wanted to make her a bracelet as a gift (this week’s photo) and I felt both inspired and nervous. I hadn’t made anything following college and it felt like somehow I’d forgotten how to do any of it. Meeting my future wife helped snap me out of that slump and I suddenly couldn’t work fast enough to finish making that bracelet in time for the Christmas holiday. Sometime between Christmas and New Year’s of 1996, I gave her the bracelet, hoping that somehow it would show her that I really liked her.
Time progressed and I managed to make several rings and quite a few bracelets. I had several setbacks though. One was when a store closed with some of my items on consignment. I never got them back.
It was sometime in late 1997 or 1998 that my grandfather’s health deteriorated due to dementia. He moved to a convalescent home in Burlington, and I was left to live alone for a short while. I managed to keep working for a bit.
It wasn’t long after that I asked my girlfriend to move in with me. She worked at an office job, and I did my best to make and sell jewelry.
After a while it became apparent to me that I would either need to start making a bunch of jewelry that I wasn’t interested in, or I’d have to start selling what little I had made in person at some sort of venue. Maybe it was the chilly damp basement I was working out of, or maybe I lacked the confidence in my work, but I was beginning to realize that if I continued as things were, I would end up hating what I was doing.
It was also difficult for me to go on dates with my girlfriend that involved much money, not that she seemed to mind.
So, I began searching for things to do instead. Something that would still utilize some of the studio art skills I had learned in college.
I found the answer by getting a job at a larger screen printing company in Burlington. I made decent money, or at least about $1500 per month or so. It may not seem like much now, but I didn’t have to pay rent while living in my grandfather’s old house. My girlfriend and I split some of the utilities and the rest was extra money that I tried to save.
My time at that company didn’t last very long though. Within 6-8 months I was running their entire pre-press department. Which would have been great, except I was the entire department. So when I asked for a raise to $10/hr, I made it clear that I would probably move on if I couldn’t get it. The head of the production department, my manager, warned me that he didn’t think the owners would give it to me. He did say that if it were up to him, he would raise it that day.
He was right. The owners thought $10 an hour was too much, even though I was responsible for preparing screens for big contracts like Pepsi, other big accounts and did a great job. I had backed myself into a corner. I wanted to advance, not look for another job. I like to think I have integrity though and knew that if I stayed after my threat to leave, that I would be taken advantage of. So, I gave a month's notice. Four weeks to find someone and get that person trained to do my job. It felt generous to me. I later heard that the replacement failed miserably and that the guy who had advanced up from my job was forced to take it back in order to keep the shirt printing operation of the company running. It was vindicating and relieving. Relieving because I knew at that moment that I had left a company that wasn’t worth working for because they didn’t actually value their employees.
By the time I left that company, my grandfather had died, I got married, and my wife and I bought a house. So all of that occurred between May of 1999 and October of 1999. Talk about life changing events occurring all at once!
There you have it. A brief synopsis of life prior to “getting a real job” and starting a family. In case you’re interested, I ended up getting into web development and rode that ride for 17 years from 2000-2017.
Then in 2020 I filed paperwork to begin my business again, same name. This time though, I created an LLC. Because, well, adulting.
News of late
- I delivered the custom name pendant order that I was working on and the customer seemed really happy with the end result
- I’ve received another order for a custom made name pendant (Yay!)
- I’m still working on all the things I’ve mentioned in the last couple of newsletters
- I’m still investigating selling print on demand items using my designs
- I’m reevaluating some of my commitments in an attempt to bring a little more breathing room into my busy work schedule
- I now have several designs prepped to begin working on, so I’m starting to turn my attention to that
Until next time,
Justin