The First Charms
Jewelry making has existed in my life for as long as I can remember, long before I understood it as craftsmanship, design, or even creativity in any formal sense. Like many creative instincts, it began through observation and imitation, through watching someone older than me create something that felt beautiful and wanting desperately to participate in it myself.
I remember my older sister Stacie stringing Pony beads onto leather cords to make long necklaces when I was very small. I would sit nearby waiting impatiently for the day I was finally old enough to make them too. Eventually, after she had moved on from the hobby, I inherited the leftover beads and cords she no longer wanted, and those materials became my first introduction to jewelry making. At the time, I could not have explained why I loved it so much. I only knew that there was something deeply satisfying about turning loose pieces into something wearable, something personal, something that suddenly felt entirely my own.
A few years later, around the age of nine, I received a friendship bracelet making kit as a gift. I still remember sitting on the windowsill at the front of our house after school, singing along to my favorite songs while knotting colored threads together and watching the occasional car pass down the dusty gravel road outside. Looking back, that period feels important in a way I could not have understood then. It was one of the first times I experienced the feeling of becoming completely absorbed in the act of making something with my hands.
The hobby followed me throughout my teenage years in different forms. Whenever I had a little extra money, I bought beads, clasps, chains, and jump rings despite how expensive jewelry supplies often were. Friends gave me jewelry making materials as birthday gifts, and I spent evenings creating pieces to match school outfits or whatever aesthetic fascinated me at the time. Jewelry existed as part of my daily life, woven naturally into the way I expressed myself and moved through different phases of growing up.
When Charlie and I first started dating, I began making friendship bracelets again, and we wore them together before we were engaged. They became our own small symbol of commitment, handmade pieces that quietly represented belonging to one another during a period of life that still felt uncertain and unfinished. Looking back now, it feels strangely fitting that jewelry would become part of our relationship long before either of us understood how much of our future would revolve around creating things together.
Resin, Music, and the Kitchen Table
Like many things in my adult life, jewelry making eventually intersected with music.
At the time, Charlie was touring in a band, and he mentioned to me that almost every band sold the same merchandise: a t-shirt, a hoodie, maybe a hat. He wanted to create something smaller and more personal, a piece people could wear every day that still carried the visual identity of the band itself. He imagined necklaces featuring album artwork rather than simply a printed logo.
At the time I was working full time during the day at an insurance agency while also attending graduate school in the evenings, but the idea consumed me almost immediately. I stayed awake late into the night watching YouTube tutorials and researching different techniques, trying to understand how to create the glossy artwork pendants I had begun imagining in my head. Eventually I discovered resin jewelry and became fascinated by the possibilities it offered.
One afternoon while Charlie was away on tour, I drove to Michaels and bought every resin supply I could reasonably afford: dyes, molds, silicone kits, jewelry resin, tools I had no idea how to use yet. When he returned home, I still did not have anything polished enough to show him proudly. Some pieces cured improperly and remained tacky, others clouded or bubbled unexpectedly, and none resembled the smooth glass-like finish I had envisioned. But the process had already hooked me.
Over time, through relentless experimentation, Charlie and I slowly taught ourselves how to make the pendants successfully. We discovered that furniture-grade resin created the glossy finish I had been searching for, and together we began producing pendants using miniature versions of his band’s artwork. We covered our kitchen table in our apartment in White Bear Lake, Minnesota with newspaper and lined up dozens of pendant blanks across the surface like tiny experiments waiting to succeed or fail. We mixed resin late into the night, popped bubbles with pins and straws, ruined entire batches through mistakes or humidity changes, and learned through repetition how delicate the entire process could be.
There was always an unpredictable quality to resin. A perfectly measured batch could still fail for reasons that seemed impossible to control. A slight bump to the table could destroy an entire evening’s work. Weather alone could affect the final result. Eventually I stopped fighting that unpredictability and began appreciating it as part of the process itself. Each pendant carried traces of experimentation inside it, evidence of trial and adjustment and patience.
That summer, when I went on tour with Charlie and his band, I sold our pendants at the merch table, watching people connect with something I had made by hand in our apartment kitchen only weeks earlier. We eventually produced wholesale pendants for other bands as well, but somewhere during those years, my relationship to jewelry making changed. The pendants had started as a practical idea tied to music merchandise, yet over time they evolved into something far more personal and creatively consuming for me.
Small Worlds
As the years passed, the pendants gradually became less connected to music and more connected to my own artistic curiosity.
I began experimenting constantly, filling resin with glitter, beads, decorative paper, confetti, rhinestones, photographs, googly eyes, stickers, melted crayons, tiny charms, and almost anything else I could imagine encasing inside resin. I loved the challenge of creating within such a small physical space. The pendants felt like tiny worlds suspended in time, each one holding its own atmosphere and personality.
One of my favorite techniques involved sharpening crayons into colorful wax shavings, melting them into swirling tie-dye patterns using the hot plate of my hair straightener, then sealing everything beneath resin alongside playful details or tiny faces. Later I became fascinated with snow globe pendants, hollow resin spheres filled with glitter, oil, beads, and floating confetti that could be shaken and watched as the contents slowly settled back into place. It took me over a year of failed experiments before I finally understood how to make them correctly, but by then experimentation itself had become part of the joy.
By the time Charlie and I moved to Washington State in 2016, jewelry making had become deeply woven into my identity. Up until then, I had mostly created pieces for myself, family members, or music-related projects, but Charlie encouraged me to finally open an Etsy shop. In fact, he created the shop for me one night while I was asleep because he believed I would continue overthinking it forever if left to my own devices.
That shop, Kaylie Caswell Designs, existed from 2016 to 2022, and during those years my creativity expanded constantly. When I was not working, I was either photographing pendants for listings, researching trends, brainstorming new collections, packaging orders, or pouring fresh batches of resin late into the night. Every pendant was handmade and individually packaged alongside a handwritten signed note.
Looking back now, I can see how many of the ideas that eventually shaped House of Caswell were already present inside those years of jewelry making. I was already thinking about emotional attachment to objects, about how wearable pieces can hold memory, symbolism, identity, and nostalgia all at once. Even then, I think I was searching for ways to turn emotion into something physical.
Eventually, as Berried Alive continued growing and more of my creative energy shifted toward music and clothing design, I began feeling myself move naturally into a different chapter. Closing the Etsy shop felt emotional, but never regretful. I still wear some of my favorite pendants from time to time, and whenever I do, they feel tied to very specific versions of myself and moments in my life.
The Logo Charm Necklace
When I launched House of Caswell, I found myself returning unexpectedly to jewelry making while developing the Still Life collection.
I still owned many of the tools I had used throughout those years, and while working on the collection, I began thinking about creating a small object that could exist alongside the garments. Something intimate enough to wear daily, something that could quietly carry the identity of the House beyond the clothing itself.
The Logo Charm Necklace grew out of that instinct.
Putting the necklaces together brought back memories of every previous phase of my relationship with jewelry making: the childhood friendship bracelets, the late nights experimenting with resin, the kitchen table covered in newspaper, the years spent building tiny wearable worlds inside pendants no larger than a couple inches wide.
The necklace itself remains intentionally simple. It features the House of Caswell logo charm and arrives in a padded lavender box printed with the House logo, assembled and packaged by hand by me.
What matters most to me, though, is the feeling surrounding it. I loved the idea of creating an object within House of Caswell that could become part of someone’s everyday life, a small keepsake connected to the larger world of the House. Clothing often enters people’s lives through occasion or styling, but jewelry moves differently. It becomes integrated into routine. It gathers memory through repetition.
In many ways, the necklace traces a line through every era of my creative life. The little girl waiting impatiently for leftover Pony beads, the teenager collecting chains and jump rings, the young woman spending nights experimenting endlessly with resin and glitter, and now House of Caswell.
The scale may have changed over the years, but the instinct itself still feels familiar.
I have always loved creating small objects that carry feeling inside them.
An Invitation
If this way of thinking resonates with you, not simply as fashion or jewelry but as a way of understanding how memory, creativity, and adornment evolve together over time, I invite you to join the Collector’s List.
I share new journal entries, collection releases, and the evolving ideas behind House of Caswell, exploring clothing and objects as memory, authorship, and forms of living expression.
You can also explore the Logo Charm Necklace, a small keepsake from the House and an ode to the years that shaped my relationship with jewelry making and wearable art.