In 1975 I sold a car and bought my first faceting machine. At the factory where I made my purchase, they offered a class that taught beginners how to cut a standard round brilliant, and my love affair with gem stones had begun. For the next 3 years, every spare moment I had was consumed with learning how to cut the various shapes you see in gems and learning about the hardness and unique qualities of each individual gem material.

At about that time, I found myself out of a job. Deciding it was time to do something on my own, I hit the road with my now growing collection of finished gems, looking to make some sales and offering my services as a cutter. The next 15 years was spent cutting gem material from around the world for the dealers I had come to know.

One day one of my customers called and said he was looking for a goldsmith to do his repair work and was wondering if I would be interested. I had been acquiring tooling and knowledge to put some metal around some of the stones in my inventory to offer for sale as finished jewelry, and cutting work was a bit slow. I was eager to learn more about working with precious metals, so I said yes, I would. I learned jewelry repair, not in a classroom, but on the jewelry of my customer’s customers (if they only knew). So, for the last 20 years my skills have grown and improved with age.

Recently I got married and my wife is interested in my work! She has been doing some of her own chain maille creations, and is having a blast. So we have two completely different styles on our site, but all the better for sales, right?

We hope you enjoy wearing the creations that we will be offering here at Etsy as much as we enjoy creating them.