There’s 8 Bebes in brand new, never-before-publicly available colorways in the shop, plus two Art Pens, including one Moon Phases Banded Bebe in Dark Sky.  I’ve been referring to this material collection as Rebirth & Rebellion, and if you look for the pattern between the names and colorway descriptions, you can probably see how each one fits in to that theme. Whether it’s growth, subverting expectations, or the ways even dangerous things can be beautiful, the theme is woven through each one of the colorways.

A quick note about this batch of Bebes: these are the first release of the new cap design. Each cap is now lined with a specialty resin liner for butter smooth closing and reduced risk of cap cracking over the course of years of daily use. I’ve been working on this redesign for months. The liner design and manufacturing methods all went into production this last month. The Bebe design was very good before, but I do very much like how they feel when closing now. Bonus? With the liner, the caps turn on the lathe more smoothly, more evenly, and faster. 

I was hesitant to make this change, but I’m glad I did. 

In other difficult changes news… 

I had to say goodbye and walk away from someone I cared about a great deal recently. Not because they did something egregiously horrible, or because of a fight, but because they kept apologizing for, of all things, disappearing because of anxiety over not meeting the expectations they assumed I had. They’d disappear, come back, apologize, and I’d reassure them I wasn’t upset – over and over. I was constantly having to constantly reassure them that I didn’t have those expectations and was just glad to hear from them whenever they had the time.  

The problem was that this was rapidly becoming the majority of the conversations, almost to the exclusion of anything else.  I was wearing out from reassuring them that they were fine as is, instead of getting to enjoy each other’s company and it had stopped being enjoyable talking to them because all I was doing was easing their anxiety caused by expectations they assumed I had- and didn’t actually have. 

So after months of this, I explained that I didn’t like this pattern for either of us, and walked away. I couldn’t enjoy their presence when the person they assumed I was was causing them distress. 

Putting your art and creative work out into the world is a lot like this, too. The temptation to apologize and try to compensate for perceived, projected, flaws and failures that we project on to the work is something we have to actively learn to stop doing. For most artists, usually, it’s couched as marketing; you don’t tell your customer what’s wrong with the piece and most will never know or notice anything is wrong. Most people don’t have the technical familiarity with the work you’re doing to even tell what’s right, never mind wrong.  

But for me, I realized that my apologizing and pointing out my own projected inadequacies of the work or my skills was taking away the joy of my work for others. I know when I find something I love, I don’t want someone telling me why it’s not good enough. I am just delighted to have found something in the often exhausting grind of life that brings me a moment of glee, excitement, happiness, appreciation, beauty! I do not need to be reminded that I do not know enough to recognize what’s flawed about this thing I just discovered. 

The same goes for sharing your work with other people. Let people enjoy your work without criticism. Let them appreciate what it is, as it is, this thing that would not exist if you had not brought it into being. Let them enjoy it. 

Do not tell them why they are wrong to love it. 

Let them love it – and you. 

-A. Markov