Early 20's, my best friend Sophie's parents were sending her to Greece for the summer. I blurted out: well what am I going to do without you? To which she replied: why not come?
First response was no, obviously, I can't. The list was long, I was in university, I had no money, and then I really thought about it.
I remembered my Canada Savings Bonds. My grandparents had left them to me and I had never touched them — the kind of thing you're supposed to leave alone, sitting quietly in a drawer being sensible on your behalf. I cashed them in and bought a ticket.
I'd been working on my dive master. I had a dive job semi lined up. I packed my gear and got on the plane.
Athens, twenty-five years ago
The domestic terminal in Athens, twenty-five years ago, was an e.d.u.c.a.t.i.o.n. There were chickens. People smoked on the planes. Lines were not a concept anyone present had agreed to — you simply moved toward the thing you wanted with a crush of people often loudly expressing themselves, and hoped to arrive where you needed to be.
Sophie had gone ahead — this being the actual phone days, when arranging to meet someone in another country meant deciding a thing in advance and then simply believing in it.
And then there was Jon.
Sophie's brother had landed on the island months before us, doing his own thing, living his own life, entirely unaware that his sister and her friend were about to arrive. I laugh when I think of the three of us in a one-room apartment in the kind of Greek heat that melts. Sophie tells me I slept in genuinely deranged positions. We ate Greek salads and fresh bread on the patio, and I can still taste that bread sopped with olive oil.
Jon — in hindsight, I am SO SORRY. You had a life. A room. Presumably plans. Then your sister and her friend moved into all three. Three people, one room, no air conditioning, Greek summer. Costa the bartender next door! This is the first apology I've ever issued and twenty-five years is not a fast turnaround.
At the time it did not cross my mind once that we might be an imposition. I was too busy making bold decisions and living my life.
Sophie and me. We are so tanned and so young.
The dive job fell through
It did. I had the certification, I had the gear, I had flown across the world for it, and it wasn't really a thing. On to the next: I landed a job at a local landmark — called the Magic Mushroom bar, no less — where I waitressed.
No mushrooms. Just drinks and its own magic. I want to be clear about that, because my friend Gillian used to send me packages and every single one of them arrived searched. Every one. Nothing in them but letters, gifts and photos.
Gillian is the other thing that island gave me — one of those soul-mate connections you don't go looking for and can't manufacture. I ended up working for her. She loved snorkeling, beaches, adventure and saying yes, like our attempting to waterski, as much as I did. Her boyfriend at the time owned a number of businesses in town, and between the two of them I got to experience the island as a bit of a local. Between summers we wrote actual letters — pen, paper, envelope, then weeks of waiting to hear what someone thought about something that had already stopped being true. I would run to the mailbox looking for a letter from Greece!
Four lilos, one very small rental car. We got them in. Barely.
Ready to go. Sophie, Gillian, Tory and me — the lilo ladies.
Everybody bought their own. There was a great deal of blowing at the other end, and not one of us regretted it. Still one of my favourite days.
The rose petals
The bouzouki clubs are the thing I still can't put into words properly.
They'd stopped the glass-breaking, I guess because too many people were getting hurt. It was literally Greek to me! They sold trays of rose petals, and we'd dance on the tables while the petals rained down over us while the bouzouki bands played. Thousands of them, through the heat and the noise.
Other nights, at the dance bars, the glasses and plates still got broken.
I've never worked out what it is about dancing like that — the volume, the heat, the beat of the music, the petals, the crash — that lands so deep. But it does. It goes somewhere words don't reach and it stays there.
The second summer
I loved it enough to go back.
Year two I lived in an apartment on the beach in Argassi, and drove a purple Vespa. I spent my days barefoot. I snorkeled — sometimes six hours at a stretch, until we came out absolute prunes, because the water was so warm and so floaty that getting out of it felt like a decision you'd need a reason for.
My room was the middle one, ground level.
I never came and went through the main door. Not once. I hopped over my balcony.
Which is how my landlords went a full month without seeing me and concluded I had moved out.
The view from my room was the beach. I've been chasing that ever since.
This was the view. Every single morning.
Thinking back, that room didn't even have a fridge. So I suppose cooking was never really on the list.
They said don't pet the cats, you'll get ringworm. I pet the cats. I got ringworm. Thankfully Gillian took me to a doctor and translated — he had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth mid worm-leg-check, prescribed me some meds I didn't know what they were, and away it went. My thigh looked branded with a perfect circle for a few weeks.
I still pet the cats.
About that beach you've seen a thousand times
Zakynthos is famous for exactly one image: Navagio — Shipwreck Beach. The rusted hull, the cliffs going straight up, the impossible water. It's on every screensaver and travel poster that has ever existed and it is genuinely that beautiful in person.
Not a postcard. My own photo, taken moments before jumping into the ocean and finding those pebbles. I did not have shoes.
Here's the part the posters leave out. It is not sand. It's small white pebbles, smooth and round, and they shift underfoot. I found this out the way most people find it out, which is by swimming in and then attempting to stand up and walk somewhere like a dignified adult.
You cannot. You crunch, you wobble, you go over. Everybody does. Bring shoes.
It's also why the water there does what it does. No sand means nothing gets stirred up, so the light goes straight down through it and comes back at you.
Which brings me to the colour.
Out past the shallows, where the shelf drops away and the sun hits it full on, there's a blue I have spent twenty-five years failing to describe.
It isn't aqua. Aqua is the pretty shallow stuff over the sand — lovely, and a completely different thing. It isn't teal either, and teal is my favorite colour on earth, so I don't say that lightly — teal has green in it and this doesn't. It isn't navy, which is what blue turns into when the light gives up. It's saturated and lit from the inside and it will not sit still. If you've seen it you already know, and if you haven't, no adjective I own is going to get you there.
This is it. That exact blue.
That's the colour I've been chasing ever since — and the one I put in glass and stone. See every Capri piece →
Why it isn't called Zakynthos
I used to name pieces after beaches I loved. Sekenia, Xigia, I didn't even try Banana Beach. Dafni worked, and is actually the name of the earrings I got placed in Vogue. I gave it up for entirely unromantic reasons: nobody could say them back to me. Greek place names are beautiful and they do not survive a phone call, a market stall, or the back of a jewelry tag.
So the blue became Capri. Five letters. Evokes an emotion. The name comes from the Mediterranean itself rather than from any one beach of mine — short enough to fit anywhere, easy enough that someone can ask for it out loud without rehearsing first.
Years later I honeymooned in Italy for three weeks, and found the same water waiting on the other side of the same sea. I was on Procida — a small island in the Bay of Naples — when the towers came down on September 11th. That's its own memory, and not one for this post, but it does mean this blue has followed me around. Or more likely it's me seeking out this blue.
It's a compromise of a name and I've made my peace with it. Every Capri piece I make is that same water — the deep part, past the shelf, in full sun. Not the postcard. The dive.
The Cleo pyramid necklace in Capri blue — same water, twenty-five years on.
What it actually cost
I worked seven days a week, 10pm to 2am — can you imagine? I had enough for rent, food and the Vespa, and that was the entire budget. Some days I barely had enough for the food part. I often tagged along with Gillian for meals and outings.
Mathew came into the Magic Mushroom one night while I was working. A Captain in the British Army. We got talking, and then it came out that in a matter of weeks he'd be running training exercises in Medicine Hat, Alberta — a two-hour drive from my house. Neither of us could believe it. Two people on a Greek island, and one of them was about to be closer to my home than I was.
By the time I was heading back there was almost nothing left. The plan was to sleep on the floor at Heathrow during my 24 hour layover.
Mathew heard that and put in a request to extend quarters on base. It came back approved. My own bunk, on a British Army base — signed in at the gate, logged in the book, visitor badge and all. Entirely above board and entirely absurd. There is a piece of paper somewhere in the Ministry of Defense with a broke Canadian waitress on it.
Which is how I came to eat breakfast in the officers' dining room in a tiny Greek top, an entire summer's worth of tan, and — thank God — a button-up I'd had the sense to throw on over it. Nobody said a word. I have never been so grateful for a collar in my life.
Picture it: me, twenty-something and broke, sleeping in an army bunk and walking into the officers' dining room for breakfast. That could be its own post one day.
But it belongs here, because it's the same thread as the rest of it — the believing I could figure it out. I kept ending up somewhere I had not planned, I kept saying yes to the adventure and that's been some of the richest moments and memories life has brought me.
Then he drove me to Stonehenge.
I had one frame left. One. I'd been rationing that roll all the way home the way you ration the last of your money, and this is film — no screen to check, no second try, weeks of waiting before you find out what you got.
I spent it there.
Stonehenge. The last frame of the whole summer. Look behind me at that white glow. It came back on the film and I've never had an explanation for it. I don't know about you — I see magic in there.
When he was over for those exercises he came up to Calgary, and I took him to Banff for the day. Fair trade.
I would do it again in a heartbeat. Definitely with more thought put into my safety — but I think some of that is youth. It has to be learned. It was also 25 years ago.
It taught me something I've never been able to un-learn: I don't need the clothes, the car, the brag. What I needed turned out to be a beach, an apartment, a Vespa, good friends, and late nights that ran from sunset straight through to sunrise.
And no cell phones. None. It was me, on an island, genuinely unreachable — which is a thing almost nobody under forty has ever experienced and which I'm not sure I could do now.
It was also not a montage. The highs were enormous and the lows were just as big. The good days felt like a dream I was somehow inside of. The bad days felt very low and very far away, and on those days all I wanted in the world was home.
Both of those are true at once. That's what the island was.
Me and my friend Gina. Twenty-five years later we still keep in touch.
The part that explains everything else
Here's the thing I've only worked out in hindsight: Capri isn't the exception. The whole line comes from this.
I started young. When I was in grade four my parents took us to live in Australia for a year on a teachers' exchange — not a holiday, a whole year. My dad worked. I walked to school past lizards and brown snakes. We lived in someone else's house, with a trampoline and an orchard, in the hills of Adelaide in a small hamlet called Houghton. We had a house and neighbors and a routine and all the boring machinery of an ordinary life, just relocated to the other side of the world. On a teachers' exchange you are plopped into someone's life exactly as they are plopped into yours.
That's the part that stuck, and it took me a long time to name it. The lesson wasn't you're allowed to go to other places. It was that you can live in them. Work in them, study in them, be inside the ordinary rhythm of somewhere for three or four months, a year or more and come out the other side having absorbed something a two-week trip can't hand you.
A visitor sees a place. Someone with a job there gets let into it — the shortcuts, the arguments, the running jokes, who to ask about what, the entire second layer that never makes it into a guidebook.
Which is exactly what Greece was. I didn't holiday on Zakynthos. I worked there, and by the end of that first summer I was a person a small part of the island recognized. Same with every trip since. Working somewhere has been my way in.
I've been adventuring ever since, mostly toward beaches.
And on every trip I've bought jewelry. Not as souvenirs, exactly. It took me years to notice what I was actually doing.
My memory is genuinely not good. It never has been — I think it's the creative brain, so much alive at once that not all of it gets filed. Names go. Details go. Whole months go.
But the jewelry doesn't. I put a piece on and the recall is physical — not a picture in my head but a feeling in my body, the temperature of the air and the sound of the place and who I was at the time. It's the most reliable memory I own and it lives in my hands rather than my head.
Here's my proof.
The turtle Gillian sent me. One of those packages — searched, of course, and containing nothing but a necklace.
I still have it. I still wear it. And every single time I put it on I get the whole thing back at once: the delight, the six-hour snorkels, the mailbox, my friends. Writing this has me wanting to go find it, put it on, message the lilo ladies and crank the dance music.
So that's what goes into each collection. Not a trend, not a colour of the season. A feeling I'm trying to hand over — the one travel gives you, that particular loosening, the version of yourself that turns up when you're somewhere new and barefoot and don't have a plan.
I encouraged my kids to travel for exactly this reason — and to go work and study somewhere, not just visit. My daughter has found her own version of it in Paris and watching that happen has been its own quiet reward. Plus I get to tag along!
I went to Greece because my best friend was leaving for the summer, and because there was maybe a scuba job. I came home with a story I could not have imagined and a whole way of working I wouldn't understand for years.
Cash in the bonds.
Athens, with the Acropolis behind me. Early twenties, leaving Greece each year left me heartbroken. All I wanted to do was go back.
The part I've never written down
For years, Capri only existed in glass.
That was the limit and I didn't question it. Glass is where I found the colour, glass is what I could get, and glass is what I made. If you wanted Capri from me, you wanted a faceted glass drop, and that was the whole conversation. That's the line I still make by hand here in Calgary — the sparkle that doesn't apologize, and the story of how it came to be.
Then I started working with my supplier in India.
Capri was the first colour we did together — and doing it meant going all the way back down to the stone. Not choosing from a tray of what already existed. Deciding the colour, and then deciding what the stone would be, and the shape, and the cut, and the metal it sat in. Every one of those a separate choice, and all of them mine.
That's the hydro quartz. It's lab-grown quartz, custom colour-treated to my blue — which is a mouthful, so here's the short version: the stone is grown rather than mined, and the colour is put there on purpose, by me, to match water I swam in twenty-five years ago. I'll always say that plainly. It's the interesting part, not the fine print.
And the moment I understood what it meant, something cracked open.
It meant Capri could be any shape. Any size. Any metal. A spike. A bezel. A chain of them. Earrings, a pendant, a bracelet if I want one. The colour stopped being a thing I found and became a thing I could build with — and after two decades of working around what was available, that is a very difficult feeling to describe to someone who hasn't had it.
I don't think I slept properly for a month. My brain was too full. Every drive, every shower, every 2am — another shape, another cut, another way it could sit on a collarbone.
That's where the Capri hydro quartz pieces come from. Everything I've custom-coloured since — every treated stone in every shade I've named — traces back to that first conversation about one specific blue.
It started with Capri. It started with the water past the shelf at Navagio.
Wear the water
Capri has its own home now — the Capri Blue collection, every piece in the colour, in one place. Most of it lives inside Glass & Light — the line I design and assemble myself, here in Calgary, which is about as far from the Ionian as a person can get without real effort. That's probably the point.
Drops, pendants, huggies, spikes. Glass and hydro quartz. Same blue every time, on purpose.
The next story before it publishes.
One email a week — Sunday morning, my voice, no fluff. Where a colour came from, what I'm wearing, and the guide before it goes live. Join the newsletter here.
- Glass & Light: The Sparkle That Doesn't Apologize — how the line came to be
- Glass & Light — the whole line
- Earrings
- Necklaces
- How lab-created gemstones are made
- What each crystal colour means — why blue lands the way it does
- How to layer with intention — stacking Capri against warm gold
Keep the plating out of pools and salt water and it'll stay bright for years — full routine in the jewelry care guide. Which, given where the colour came from, is a genuinely annoying instruction to have to give.
Mystic Soul Jewelry — Canadian small business, Calgary, Alberta, since 2008.
