Meet Alena

I'm done staying small. I'm done making myself comfortable for everyone else. I'm Alena — and I'm just getting started.

I grew up off the grid — and I mean that literally. Fifty acres in southwest Wisconsin, no electricity, hauling water from an artesian spring, kerosene lanterns after dark. My parents built our home from a salvaged mill the summer that I turned 7, living in tents while the walls went up. It was scrappy and beautiful and completely normal to me.

We went to art shows. We peeled trees. My dad made willow furniture from an article he'd found in Mother Earth News. My mom taught us the local wildflowers on every hike. Art and craft and handwork weren't hobbies in our house — they were just life.

When I was 12, our house burned down. In the middle of winter.

We rebuilt. Logs we'd already prepared, a cabin that's still standing today. My parents still live that way. That fire taught me something I've never been able to shake: things are just things. What matters is what you carry inside you, and what you build with your hands.

I went on to earn a degree in Botany from UW-Madison, fought wildland fires (that's where I met my husband), went to massage school, climbed trees for a living, and earned a Master's in Public Health from the American University of Beirut. Life has been wide and full and nothing like I planned.

When our second child was about two, I felt like I was disappearing. So I rented a cabin for four days, just to breathe. On a whim I brought a bag of beads I'd had since I was a teenager — and I made sixty pairs of earrings. I didn't stop. I couldn't.

That was the beginning. Eventually we moved to Wyoming, I picked up a torch, and I've never looked back.

Every piece I make is rooted in the natural world I've loved my whole life. My botany degree isn't a fun fact — it shows up in every botanical piece I create. I'm not interpreting nature. I know it. I grew up in it. I have the wildflower IDs memorized and the prescribed burn smoke in my memory.

I want the person who wears my work to feel something. To see a maple samara and remember spinning in the grass as a kid. To wear a dragonfly and feel their grandmother close. To put on a piece of silver and feel, just for a moment, like themselves again.

I spent a long time making myself smaller than I am. Playing it safe. Staying quiet.

That's changing.

I'm a woman who grew up building homes with her hands, foraging for morels on Mother's Day, and learning that everything you need is already inside you — sometimes it just takes a fire to show you. I make jewelry that carries that same truth. Bold. Rooted. Unapologetically alive.

With filthy hands and a grateful heart,
Alena