What's in a name?

...that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell just as sweet...


One of the first ideas I had when I started Hazel Designs was to name my pieces after girls' names to infuse them with more of a "personality." The logical next step was to name them after my female friends and family.

So I started doing this. But then, as I went through the names, I began to worry. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to match the "personality" of the necklace to the personality of the real person. One necklace was whimsical and had a sort of gentle look to it - does this match better with that friend or this friend? While this other necklace was more funky and bold and colorful - is this more of this family member or that family member? And does this one look more like a "Mandy" or a "Meridith"? And then, as if that wasn't enough to agonize over, I began worrying over the possibility that the person would get offended if the necklace I named after her wasn't to her liking.

I got a fierce headache.

So I scrapped the whole idea and instead went to a baby naming website and picked out names that I loved, and this seemed to work out very nicely. I received many positive responses and feedback.

I kept going back and forth, though, on naming the pieces after my friends and family, and when my sister also, independently, suggested this idea, I finally decided to go ahead and follow my first inclination.

So now, each new piece that comes out from here on will be named after my female friends and family (until I run out of them), and you might have already noticed that I started doing this with recent pieces "Mariel" and "Mary" (warning: I do have a lot of friends whose names begin with "M", as you can probably already tell!).

And to my friends and family, if you somehow end up not liking your "namesake", please don't be offended. You know I love you!