A childhood fascination with plants led me to a master’s degree in Plant Anatomy and I use the textures and forms of the Plant Kingdom in all my jewelry. Moving from Arkansas to Idaho in 1989 opened up my vistas, changed my color palette, and inspired me to add leather and stones to my designs. I had begun my jewelry-making journey by teaching myself to repair treasured flea-market finds. I quickly progressed to using metal clay techniques to sculpt silver, bronze and copper pieces. In the last five years, I have moved into traditional metal-smithing, adding sheet metal to the metal clay pieces. I began teaching jewelry-making classes ten years ago and now topics on my class list range from metal clay to enameling to fusing to cold connections and fabrication.

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I feel increasingly that all my influences come from nature, that I am deeply rooted in every sense, in these mountains of Idaho.