Silver is one of the few materials we wear that actually gets better with time. It darkens, it softens, it takes on the life of the person wearing it. A piece made well today will still be on someone's hand three generations from now. That idea — that something I make with my hands this afternoon might be clasped around a wrist I'll never know, decades after I'm gone — is the reason I do this work.

I've been working with silver since I was fourteen, starting with stained glass before the metal itself pulled me in for good. Now, from a one-person studio in the New Hampshire woods, I create and finish every piece by hand. There's no assembly line here. No outsourcing. No catalog of designs stamped out by the thousands. Just me, my tools, and the silver.

Every piece begins as a thought. Sometimes it starts with a stone that speaks to me, sometimes with a shape I can't get out of my head, sometimes with a technique I want to push further. But it always starts with intention. From that first idea through every cut, every hammer strike, every pass with the flame — there is a person behind the work, making decisions, solving problems, caring about the outcome. That's something no factory can replicate, and it's something you can feel when you hold the finished piece in your hand.

I believe there's a kind of spirit that lives in handmade things. Not in any mystical sense, but in a very real one — the hours of focus, the labor, the stubbornness it takes to get something right. All of that becomes part of the object. A mass-produced ring is worth its weight in metal. A piece made by hand, with thought and intention, carries something more. It carries the time and attention of the person who made it. That's a value that transcends material, and it's the difference between something manufactured and something genuine.

In a world full of things made fast and cheap by corporate machines, I think there's real meaning in choosing something made slowly and carefully by a single pair of hands. Something bespoke. Something that was imagined, labored over, and finished with pride.

That's what I try to put into every piece that leaves my bench. When you choose something made by hand by an independent artist, you're not just buying jewelry — you're saying that craftsmanship still matters, and that the people who do this work are worth supporting.