I’m Jai from Earth Goddess Jewellery by Jai and I create beautiful handmade healing crystal jewellery for the mind body and soul. I’m 42 years young and live in Norwich with my hubby, my dog pixie and my 6 chickens Browny, Snowy, Leghorn, Rogue, Suzy and Dot (they live in the garden not our house lol).

I wasn’t very artistic at school in that I couldn’t even draw a stick man and tended to gravitate more today sports, mainly swimming and dancing and was part of a synchronised swimming team up until age 18 when I decided to up sticks and become a fitness instructor on cruise liners which I did for 3 years and was fortunate enough to see all 7 continents of the world. I’ve always been drawn to beautiful things and would spend hours beach combing for pretty stones and shells with my dad as a child then gluing them to garden pots. I collected lots of beautiful things during my time on the cruise liners, jewellery, sculptures, art, more stones and shells and also a load of old tatt (which I thought was lush at the time – but it really wasn’t)

After 3 years I decided there was no place like home and returned to Norwich where I managed a health club for a few years, before upping sticks for a second time to work in Greece and then St Anton in Austria for an activities holiday company. after a couple more years I’ll returned home again, went on a cruise for a holiday and met my future husband, he moved from Romania to the UK and we settled down and got married. I wanted a job that didn’t include evenings and weekends so landed myself an entry level admin job with Norwich city council, and I’ve been there ever since, I’ve changed roles several times and now work in environmental services.

Throughout all these years my jewellery collection grew and I did a silver-smithing course around 10 years ago which I loved but didn’t really continue with it at the time.  Some years ago me and my husband went our separate ways and a few years later I met my current hubby (he’s not my actual hubby as I’m not going to bother with the marriage part again) but he’s my hubby in all but law. I fell pregnant in 2016 but sadly had an ectopic pregnancy and have struggled to conceive ever since the stress of this and other life events led to me having a breakdown last year and to try to assist my recovery my parents brought me a jewellery making set, beads finding basic tools etc, I had counselling and various other assistance and slowly I started to recover, and as I recovered I rediscovered my love of making jewellery. At around the same time I met a reiki healer and had several sessions with her working on me with energy and crystals and my recovery skyrocketed. I then switched my jewellery making focus to healing crystals and my little biz was born ?

I discovered MMFH on Instagram and decided to take the plunge at their second virtual Market by posting my first ever IG video, Andy and Mrs G spotted me and we got chatting and they kindly invited me to tell my mental health journey on the first day of mental health awareness week. It was absolutely amazing, it felt so good to share my story and the response I had from others was crazy good. MMFH is such a wonderful community based market, it’s a creative family, it has this special something that I can’t put my finger on but it’s just the Mac daddy of online markets (in my opinion) I love how they encourage everyone to grow, share, collaborate and work as one for the greater good of the creative community. MMFH has my heart for sure.

You can enjoy our Midday Makers chat with Jai on our MMFH IGTV channel.

Check out Jai’s Instagram account @earthgoddessjewellerybyjai