Jewelry Making

I hadn’t visited Stylebakery in awhile so when I went there yesterday there were a lot of new jewelry designers in their Designers on the Rise series. Here’s one that I picked to show today: Jessica Hicks Jewelry.

From her studio in Nantucket, Jessica creates bold yet highly delicate precious metal-centric pieces infused with a playful sense of wonder. Having attended Worcester Center for Crafts and later at University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth under jewelry and metals, she later decided to put her metalworking skills to the test and started up her own fashion jewelry line. Her focus is earrings and pendant necklaces though she does have a few bracelets.

Here’s a little bit about her design philosophy from her website:

“My jewelry is contemporary and bold. I design pieces that demand attention with their geometric shapes, hidden elements, movement and texture. My creations encourage further investigation; where the observer expects to see stones set, I place free-flowing crystals that give the illusion of color contained within pierced metal.”

While she does use other materials like Mother of Pearl in a few of her pieces, the majority are based around delicate thin pieces of silver or 14K gold. Here’s one of her pieces that we liked, these large teardrop-shaped Paisley Silver Earrings that hang about 2 inches long.

Many of the pieces have this same definite style: thin, lacy precious metal wafers embedded with patterns of tiny holes. Interestingly, these actually remind me of some flat cookies that I’ve had that I can’t remember the name of… I think they were Italian? The shapes of her items include leaf or tear-drop, butterfly, flower, circle, and square shapes. Along with metal, they are paired with interesting precious stones like citrine, amethyst and garnet. It’s sort of cool that the focus of the piece is often the metalwork rather than the gemstone - those are more of an accent than the primary feature.

You can visit Jessica Hicks Jewelry on the web at: www.jessjewels.com