A Family Affair

We live in a world where most things we buy are mass produced, put on a shelf and sold to us. Once it was common to go to a craftsperson and have something made especially for us – the way we wanted it to be. This is exactly what I offer.

Christmas card

The oak leaf rings

This past Christmas I received a picture from a couple I made wedding rings for five years ago. They had found me on the internet. We exchanged e-mails and then met at my studio. They wanted their rings to have an oak leaf pattern. I did some sketches with their input and made the rings. I have not seen them since.

It is a truly wonderful picture and I am so pleased they wanted to share this event in their marriage with me. It made my day. 

Driftwood rings

Last week I received an email from former customers announcing another new arrival:

"Hey Jim, it's Mark and Anna!

You designed our rings over seven years ago when my husband came to you with his idea and you created a beautiful engagement/wedding ring out of cast driftwood twigs. We hope you are well! We would love to see you, and if possible perhaps get our rings cleaned, this Saturday - as we plan to be in Stillwater. Also, we have a little girl, Lenora who is almost 4 months old and we would love to introduce you to her!

Mark, Anna, and their baby

Let us know if this might be a possibility. Ideally we could stop by mid morning.
Cheers, Anna and Mark"

I guess my point is that the rings symbolizing a marriage are more meaningful when you know the person who makes them and when they are made especially for you. In a way, we become part of each other’s lives, part of an extended family.

Please check out my “customer letters” page on my web site and feel free to contact me for more information. And I would appreciate your sharing this blog with anyone you feel may be interested.

Farm Girl

I recently made wedding rings for a lovely couple, Gay and Ann. They had been together for many years and were now able to be legally “married”. As part of the process of deciding what the rings would look like I showed them all of the possibilities I have to offer. They chose their ring designs which were a pair of magical double Mobius strip bands (subject of another blog sometime!). One day Ann called me to ask if I could make a pendant for Gay as a wedding gift from her. She remembered a line of jewelry that I make from tiny pieces of driftwood from the north shore and asked if I could make a pendant from a piece of birch bark. We managed to find a piece from a small branch that had all the distinctive markings associated with that look and I made the pendant. 

Some time passed and I get another call from Ann asking about a pendant for herself. She was raised on a farm and has always thought of herself as a “farm girl”. Her parents no longer ran the farm but knew the people who did. She said there used to be a hundred year old hay barn on the farm that had fallen down. Some of the pieces had been saved. Ann asked if I could possibly use a piece of the old weathered barn wood as a background for the pendant. “Sure!”

Ann went to visit her parents. Her father is living with Alzheimer’s disease. As they were talking she asked her father if he could draw a picture of the old barn. He used to entertain her as a bored child in church with simple sketches. He proceeded to draw a very nice likeness of the old Illinois barn from memory. They then got a small board from the barn and brought it to me. 

I was able to make a reverse impression of the wood texture and from that make a positive in wax. I carved “farm girl” in one piece of the wax and carved a copy of the sketch of the barn in another piece as a pendant for Ann’s mother. We are all pretty happy with the result.

Cabin Sketch 

Wood piece from the Barn

reverse image of barn wood piece in silver

Wax casting

  

Finished pendant

Stebgo Metals

It is important to me to integrate my values with the people I work with. I would like to share with you a brief story of the company I buy my gold from.  This is a small, local, family owned business called Stebgo metals. I have been with them from the beginning more than thirty years ago. Tom Stebbing Sr. worked for another company that I dealt with occasionally but did not connect with particularly well. But I liked and respected Tom. Tom left that company and started his own company which is now run by his children whom I knew as little kids. I have included a link to a recent article in a trade magazine called Mid-America Jewelry News If you would like to read more about the company. http://midamericajewelrynews.com/featured-articles/1583-minnesotas-stebgo-metals-a-greener-integrity-minded-family-refinery 

The reasons I deal with Stebgo are first of all these are honest and honorable people. They offer a good reliable product, they are prompt and fair in their pricing. They provide only recycled gold. We all consume products that in their production have an impact on the environment. I, as I am sure you do, try to choose those that have the least impact. The practice of offering only recycled gold means that less of the earth is torn up to find new gold by mining. They have invested in state of the art facilities to make the refining process as environmentally save as is possible.

One of the services I offer is to recycle old gold that you may have; broken chains, no longer warn class rings, single earrings, ugly jewelry you know you will never wear, even old gold teeth returned by the dentist. I pay considerably more for this gold, silver or platinum than anyone else I know of. I collect it and when I have enough I bring it to the refinery and have it returned to me as pure gold which I then alloy to make Karat gold to make new pieces. The value of this gold can be used for payment of something new that I would make for you (often I can use the actual gold in the new piece if it has sentimental value) or I will give you a check. Now is a good time to sell since the price of gold is high and it will be recycled as beautiful and meaningful handmade jewelry. (And you know it’s just going to sit in that little drawer for another twenty years)

Jim