If you only knew Kay Wang through her Instagram — and chances are you might, considering her 33,000 followers — you wouldn’t necessarily immediately know what she does for a living. She could easily be a baker, a stylist, a ceramicist, or a woodworker; in December alone, she posted pictures from her Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, apartment of the frangipane tart she’d baked, the cherry cutting boards she’d sanded and oiled, the canvas bags she’d dyed with onion skin, and the silk cord necklaces she’d strung with hand-carved brass pendants. (And you’d certainly never guess that she spent nine years before moving to Brooklyn as an online marketer in Los Angeles and Seattle.) What she is, very clearly, is a restless creative spirit; so much so that even though her main focus right now is as a jewelry designer who crafts under the moniker The Things We Keep, she has trouble pinning herself with a specific label.
“It’s not that I don’t consider myself a designer, but I think there’s a big difference between people who design and people who make,” Wang explains. “I do things from start to finish. I design and I also fabricate, and though jewelry’s specifically what I do, it’s not beadwork. It’s casting, it’s working with wax, it’s working with metal. It has traditionally not been considered an art. It’s traditionally been considered skilled labor, which adds another layer of complexity. So I guess the short version is I don’t have a particular label. It’s more that I find a lot of value in designing something — seeing it in my mind and being able, with my two hands and through a craft that I’ve honed, to make it into something tangible that I can feel and I can show you.”
No matter what it is she’s doing, though, it’s found her a good deal of success in the time since she switched gears three years ago — or at least enough success that she felt brave enough to make jewelry a full-time gig. Wang says she felt inspired by the small community of makers in Brooklyn who seemed to be in the same boat: “It’s incredibly liberating to find that people you think are doing really well still had day jobs that they didn’t let on before they made the leap. To know that you can do something and a number of years down the road, you can say this is not for me and move on to something else.”
We recently caught up with Wang in the live/work space she shares with her boyfriend, her dog, and her two cats, Sushi and Chops, inside a converted textile factory. Her apartment seems of a piece with her jewelry line — a small space that’s been carefully edited to let each item breathe and show off its quiet simplicity. Also: a space to chow down on flourless peanut butter cookies topped with sea salt, which Wang had baked the day before we arrived. Either way, it’s a nice place to spend the afternoon.
“Our apartment is perpetually in some state of tumult, so a pillow overturned here and stuff on our coffee table there can usually be taken for granted,” says Wang. “The couch is a vintage Vatne Mobler couch that I scored on eBay and had shipped all the way from Ohio to NYC. (I really wanted it!)”
“The studio space as it lives underneath our bedroom loft, with everything handy nearby. The cross brace on the frame for the loft lent itself very well to shelving, so we put up a number of shelves just above the bench to keep everything within arm’s reach. A basket from Doug Johnston can be seen in the background, and I made the hanging Himmeli mobile out of white coffee stirrer straws. The jewelry rack to the left was repurposed from a piece of driftwood I found on the Washington coast.”
“Since moving out of my ceramics studio in Queens, I’ve had to move all my unfinished ceramic work home, and here it lives temporarily alongside some bracelets both made and acquired over the years.”
“A favorite little storage cabinet from a salvage shop when I went to visit a friend in DC. It came with probably a good five pounds of rusty nails, drill bits and random old bits and bobs when I acquired it. It now houses a variety of my jewelry supplies and components.”
“A magnetic knife rack from Ikea makes a great tool rack to keep pliers handy without taking up any valuable bench space.”
An array of studs from The Things We Keep atop a weaving Wang made using a blue rope gifted by her friend, the designer Ilana Kohn.
“I make everything here,” says Wang. “The casting is the only part of the process that I don’t do, because it’s pretty toxic and very equipment intensive. The top part of the stud is cast and the posts I put on myself. Then everything is hand finished here. These are some unfinished studs, that’s what it looks like when I get it back. There’s quite a bit or work that still needs to be done and it’s a huge pain in the butt because things are so tiny!”
More pieces from The Things We Keep. Many of Wang’s pieces are inspired by nature, including the tiny kidney studs in the foreground, which were cast from the leaf of a tiny succulent plant.
Wang’s sweet and photogenic dog Corn, who features prominently on The Things We Keep Instagram, which, if you aren’t following yet, you should!
“Our one lady animal of the household, Sushi. Along with her half brother Chops, they’ve been with me since they were kittens through three state moves!”
“Our cat Chops love to munch on greenery, so for years I gave up on keeping any plants in the house until I acquired this steel cabinet from an opp shop in Bushwick. It’s the perfect height to keep all possible veggie kitty snacks out of kitty’s way, but short enough so that I can still easily water our plant friends.”
“The bench came from my boyfriend’s mother and had been in her family for as long as she can remember; it’s gone through several phases since moving to the big city, from plant stand to extra seating to its present configuration, a little display nook for the tiny ceramic pieces I’ve collected, a Morgan Peck sculpture and an ever growing collection of beads from my friend Julianne Ahn of Object & Totem.”
Since we visited, Wang has repurposed those beads into a wall hanging, using a tiny vine of driftwood.
“The big hanging wooden plane came from one of my favorite swap meets, the Pasadena Community College swap meet. Despite the fact that it really does fly, for now it hangs out looking through the windows at the passersby on our block and the automotive garage across the street. The bottles on the windowsill are lucky finds from Bottle Beach at Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn. I love the way they catch the light on a sunny day.”
Inspiration pieces and thrift-store ceramic finds including a striated mug by Robert Blue on the top shelf and our own Rubber-Dipped Dot Mug by Josephine Heilpern of Recreation Center (Wang is the one who first introduced us to Josephine’s work!)
More ceramics including a few made by Wang herself.
“A collection I’ve kept for some time: a few of my vintage cameras sit high on a shelf we built above our kitchen cabinets.”
An aerial view of the living room. Not shown (we couldn’t get a good angle!): the amazing pair of long horns Wang lugged all the way from a thrift shop in Long Beach, CA. “If you stand it end to end, it’s taller than me. It’s really cool.”
“Many people ask about the textile hung on the wall above our bed, but it’s really just a small rug,” says Wang. “Some textiles stacked on the shelf were acquired on previous travels to Iceland, Vietnam and Turkey, and a few other favorite things hang out on the shelf above the bed.”
Wang wearing her own designs: Vik Mountain studs, Brekka Ring, and her new brass and sterling silver Elta Rings, which were inspired by the bandsaw blade at her friend Arielle Alasko’s studio. Go to The Things We Keep to purchase!
On a shelf in the home office designer Kiel Mead shares with his girlfriend, the performance artist Sarah Boatright, sits a set of drawers stuffed with backstock of his Forget Me Not rings, little string bows cast in precious metals. Mead’s breakout design when he was still studying furniture at Pratt, the rings were the genesis of the 27-year-old’s fascination with casting objects into wearable reminders — of childhood, of holidays, of lost loves, of an old car he once drove. Boatright, 23, also deals with the preservation of memories in her work, dressing up in goofy wigs to make reenactment videos of family Thanksgivings or furtively recorded interactions between strangers, which go on to enjoy eternal life on YouTube. So if you’d expect the couple’s Brooklyn apartment to be decked out with the kind of overstyled chicness typical of two young creatives, one of whom practically runs the Williamsburg branch of The Future Perfect, you’d be mistaken: Like their creations, the possessions they keep on display are more about storytelling than status.
Caitlin Mociun may have been the author of a cult-hit fashion line for only a few years, but the lessons she learned from that stint — about the way she wants a customer to feel, or about the way a body moves in space — inform nearly everything she does today. That first becomes clear when she talks about her massively successful fine jewelry line, which she launched almost as a palliative to her days as a clothing designer. “I never really liked doing my clothing line, and when I switched to jewelry it was such a different response,” Mociun told me earlier this fall when I visited her year-old Williamsburg boutique. “It seemed to make people feel good about themselves as opposed to clothing, which often makes people feel bad.” But it’s when she talks about her boutique that you realize that nothing in the shop could be the way it is if Mociun weren’t first a designer.
Midway through our visit to Erin Considine’s Greenpoint, Brooklyn apartment earlier this summer, we began talking about her parents, who — no surprise here — are interior designers. She told us a story about her father being on a job site in Connecticut in the 1980s, where a company was giving away all of its Knoll furniture. A set of Mies van der Rohe Brno chairs here, a Saarinen Tulip table there — these are sorts the things the Brooklyn jewelry designer grew up with. When my jaw dropped, she shrugged. “It’s just being in the right place at the right time,” she says.
