At my favorite Mexican restaurant in South Lake Tahoe, Maya’s Mexican Grill where they make housemade tortillas, a display next to the cash register shows off intricately wire-wrapped jewelry. Stones and copper wire are shaped into tree pendants, half opalite moon earrings are secured in silver-plated wire and delicately beaded dreamcatcher earrings appear as though a lot of love and time have been put into them. All of this is the work of South Lake Tahoe resident Ketsia Maya, who has been making WiredWithin jewelry since late 2017.
“I’ve been more into beadwork, but then one day I bought a box of beads off Facebook and it came with different 20-gauge wire coils. I wrapped three pendants with them and became obsessed.”
–Ketsia Maya
“I’ve always been into jewelry. I’ve been more into beadwork, but then one day I bought a box of beads off Facebook and it came with different 20-gauge wire coils. I wrapped three pendants with them and became obsessed,” she says.
The surprise box of coils was fun to practice with and she began looking up tutorials on YouTube, teaching herself how to hold stones in wire, she says.
“Wrapping a bead is a lot easier than wrapping a stone without a hole,” says Maya.
She explains that her first designs were made by wrapping beads with wire and once she got the hang of that she moved to wrapping cabochons. Maya got so into it that she was making one to two pendants a day throughout the winter, building up her collection. In the beginning she wanted to get pendants down first, but three months into her new wire-wrapped jewelry hobby she began making earrings — and now she makes rings, anklets, keychains and bookmarks, as well.
“I would get off work [at Wells Fargo] and just make jewelry. I wasn’t going out that much and just got good at it,” she says.
When spring 2018 rolled around, she put in an application to set up a booth at Live at Lakeview and began selling her jewelry called WiredWithin and also participated in the Ski Run Farmers’ Market.
“People loved it,” she says. “I recognized a lot of customers from Wells Fargo and met a lot of visitors. People thought they made great gifts.”
She spent months thinking about an appropriate name. She asked her coworkers at Wells Fargo for suggestions and her manager just blurted it out: “Wired Within.” Maya loved the name and soon after launched her website, Twitter, Instagram and Etsy accounts. Before the pandemic hit she planned on opening a storefront by Ski Run Marina and continue participating in crafts fairs, but all of that has been put on hold.
“Everything started getting canceled so I had to shift the direction that the business will go. I’m just hanging tight right now, taking things as they come and going with the flow,” she says.
Currently, WiredWithin jewelry is sold at Maya’s Mexican Grill in South Lake Tahoe and at Mountain Freak Boutique in Truckee, as well as online at her website and on Etsy. Her most popular item is the opalite moon necklace wrapped in silver-plated copper.
“People love the color. It’s almost like they glow when they’re on you. They’re exceptionally beautiful,” she says, adding that the wire she uses is solid copper with .125 sterling-silver casing that can be easily be polished.
Maya released a Black Lives Matter collection on Etsy where all the money from products sold is funneled into ActBlue charity and BLM.org.
“I have new bookmarks with the BLM charm and opalite moons; a lot of the collection is set in sterling silver. After everything that happened with George Floyd and having all my shows canceled, I was feeling sad and helpless. I had bought all these crystals and wires to get ready for the show season. I have all this material, so I decided to start this collection and donate the proceeds from the sales,” she says. | wir3dwithin.com, etsy.com
