We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Leslie Ligon. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Leslie below.
Hi Leslie, thanks for joining us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?
The family motto my husband and I shared with our sons is, “Be bold and brave.” (Followed closely by, “Brave or stupid,” which we yell in a Monty Python style delivery, and often includes sledgehammers and pry bars … lol)
All of life is bound, if you’re fortunate, to provide risk-taking times, but life-changing experiences (a break-in while I was home, and 10 days later, a house fire in my parents’ house when I was staying there recovering from the break-in) in my late 20s, helped prepare me for some of the biggest heartbreaks and most breathtaking risks I could ever have expected.
Married for the first time at 36, I was 39 when our older son was born. Naturally we were happy but anxious, and wanted to do our best to ensure he’d have a great start in life! After a bumpy beginning, we took our son for his first new baby exam when he was two months old. That Friday I’d scheduled time to visit a daycare, and afterward, lunch and a shopping trip with my mother. At the pediatrician’s office that morning we were laughing one minute over just how much weight our baby had gained, reeling the next after she turned to face us and said, “Brace yourselves, I don’t think Ethan can see.” That was 26 years ago, June 23.
Most assuredly, our lives have been filled since then with risks we’ve taken personally and professionally, and though we may wish we’d tweaked two or three things, we’ve never regretted any of them.
To this day, we’re still taking risks, hoping to continue demonstrating life is in the living, breathing, risk-taking change we have been extremely fortunate to take!
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I’ve always been a creative person; performing and visual arts were a part of my life from the time I was about five. Beginning with ballet, and going into theater (serendipitously, in a Dallas Equity theater, playing Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker), then finding jewelry arts when I was about 10, and making my first American Indian style loomed beadwork jewelry. By the time I was a teen, I was pounding sterling silver out on my parents’ patio, not expecting, but not disliking (more risk!) the textures from that.
The jewelry work I’m best known for is my line of braille jewelry, which I started because I wanted people to know more about how incredibly easy it is to read braille. In 2000, Ethan was 3-years-old, just starting his schooling. We learned from one of his first teachers braille is read by as *few* as 10 percent of people who are blind and visually impaired, I was already designing and selling jewelry, but then my husband who teaches typography, pointed out braille’s simply another typeface. I realized I could design pieces around a word, or letters, and put the correlating print on the back of the piece, and it would, hopefully, help spread a greater understanding of braille within the sighted community so they’d begin to understand the importance of it.
In January 2002, I flew to Shanghai to work with manufacturers who’d said they could mass-produce my jewelry, making it much more affordable than if I made each piece by hand. Imagining I’d likely have the first 2000 hearts I’d designed hanging on our Christmas tree the following December, I was fortunate to have a writer friend help me get the story going in time for Valentine’s Day 2002. We set up a web site, and were gob-smacked by the orders that came in from the first magazine to run a story in the February issue of Family Circle.
So many people wrote thanking me for producing an affordable ($10) necklace with heart-shaped pendant bearing the word “love” on the front in braille, and the back in print. Soon after, I produced my signature piece – the alphabet bracelet – “my braille fashion cheat-sheet.” I’m proud to have won the 2010 Smithsonian/Cooper-Hewitt Design Award, presented to me by Cynthia Rowley, and earning me a trip to the White House the following September for a design luncheon hosted by Michele Obama and Tim Gunn!
Though I stopped manufacturing pieces overseas, I still make hand cast pewter and sterling jewelry that is tactilely and visually readable (otherwise, it isn’t braille) and, which is available in prices beginning at $10.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
Five or six years after beginning At First Sight, I began seeing/hearing about other people making pieces very much like mine. Some was well made, with a clear understanding of braille; other pieces were made with no concept at all. Unfortunately for my own line, most people did have a much better idea of marketing – even before social media took off – and so my jewelry sales began to slide. They’d never been huge, because the greater population (sighted people I’d hoped would become enthusiastic) did not learn about it, and my particular style of incorporating braille into an inherently lovely design faded as other people making braille jewelry made more rudimentary pieces.
Many things happened over a period of three to four years that caused so much distress I began loosing myself in trying to keep up with new, cheaper styles of braille jewelry. The love and joy or making different pieces was overshadowed by my desire to “keep up” by making things the way other people were – even when I didn’t like them, or they weren’t my own idea. In 2015, I went back to my performing arts roots, working in voiceover, barely doing anything with jewelry. That was certainly good for me emotionally, but I nearly let the jewelry die altogether, which I had *not* intended.
In the midst of the pandemic two years ago, I had a fairly life-changing surgery: open-heart surgery for a congenital heart defect that had gone relatively unnoticed. I’d read about how that often makes people stop and take stock of their lives, and I was definitely in that category!
Pivoting from jewelry to voiceover, now back to jewelry has given me a fresh perspective on many things. The most important lesson in it, retrospectively, is that I have not walked away when things get hard. Rather, I’ve learned the value of letting go, even if only for a short time, of things that are not enriching you and peripherally, the lives of those around you. I’ll never wonder “what if,” I’ll only think, “Yes, and …”
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
Initially, I felt hurt when my braille designs were being emulated. Starting with two or three individuals copying, and culminating in the most egregious – flat-out stealing my signature design, (Imitation doesn’t feel like flattery when you haven’t even been asked before make something that’s so much a part of your life; braille is like my third child.)
I continued trying to create more and different styles, all the while, (again, before social media) hoping someone or something would help propel my story to the next level. Definitely falling into the “Brave or stupid” category, I kept this up while raising our two sons through their more turbulent teen years. Gradually, I came to understand the thing I’d truly hoped would happen *had* happened; these people had all been moved one way or another to make braille jewelry likely because of what I’d done. By choice or by chance, lives had been changed by what I started at a time when most people didn’t have personal computers, and certainly didn’t have social media! 
Contact Info:
- Website: www.AtFirstSightBrailleJewelry.com
- Instagram: Braillestone
- Facebook: www.Facebook.com/At First Sight Braille Jewelry
- Linkedin: Leslie Ligon
Image Credits
Eric Ligon