I Don’t Design My Jewelry — Here’s What I Do Instead

The Piece Tells Me What It Wants To Be

There is a question I get asked regularly, and I always have to think carefully about how to answer it in a way that people who aren’t me can understand.

How do you design your pieces?

The honest answer is – I don’t. Not in the way the word design usually implies. There is no sketch on paper. No finished image in my head that I then set about constructing. No mood board, no technical drawing, no predetermined outcome waiting to be executed.

What there is, is a feeling.

The feeling comes first. Always. It might be the feeling of being somewhere – not the place itself, but what it feels like to be in it. The particular weight of the air somewhere ancient. The specific quality of light on water in the late afternoon. What it feels like to be standing at the edge of something enormous and knowing, with your whole body, that this is what it feels like to really live.

Sometimes the feeling comes from a stone. I pick it up – at a beach, on a mountain path, at a trade fair where I’ve found my way to the table of someone who actually hunted it themselves – and something happens. A recognition. Not a vision of a finished piece, nothing as linear as that. More like a door opening slightly, and knowing that whatever is behind it belongs to me.

I go down to my studio

which looks, to anyone who doesn’t know it, completely chaotic, and makes absolute sense to me – and I start. I pick up the stone, or the clay, or a string of beads, and my hands begin. The design happens in the making. The piece finds its own form as I work, and my job is less to impose a vision than to pay close enough attention to recognize what it’s becoming.

There is one other thing worth naming here. I don’t consider myself a jewelry designer. I am a jewelry artist. The distinction matters to me – not as a title, but as a description of how this work actually happens. A designer works toward a predetermined outcome. What I do is closer to intuition. To following something I can’t always name until the piece is finished and I can finally see what it was trying to be.

This is not how the jewelry industry works. It is exactly how I work.

Some pieces arrive quickly. There was an afternoon not long ago when I was preparing to represent a friend’s collection of kimonos at an event. I was wearing a vintage turquoise hand-painted silk kimono from the 1920’s – one of the most beautiful things I own – and I realized I needed a piece of jewelry that could hold its own alongside it. Something with the same weight and presence.

I went to my studio and made a pyrite ring. In an afternoon.

I want to be clear about what that means – and what it doesn’t. That a piece can be made in an afternoon is not a comment on its value. It is a comment on what twenty years of working with these materials makes possible. The hours are not in that afternoon alone. They are in every afternoon that came before it, every mistake, every technique learned and relearned, every piece that didn’t work and taught me something that I needed in order to grow in my artistic vision.

The ring is still not finished, as it happens. I keep changing my mind about the color. Some pieces, even the ones that arrive fast, ask for more time before they’re truly done. I have learned to respect that.

And then there are the pieces that simply wait.

I have things on my bench right now that have been there for two years. Not because I’ve abandoned them – because I haven’t found what belongs with them yet. The right stone. The right element. The thing that will make the piece finally make sense. Until that arrives, the piece sits. Patient. Certain, somehow waiting for me to solve the puzzle that it holds within itself.

I used to find this frustrating. Now I understand it as part of the process. A piece that won’t finish is telling me something. I’ve learned to set it aside rather than force it, to come back weeks or months later with different eyes, and to trust that the moment of recognition will come. It always does. Usually when I’m in the middle of something else entirely.

The piece that changed everything for me was an amethyst.

I had been making jewelry for years by then – on and off, between other things, the way creative work often exists in a life that also has other demands. But this particular piece was different. When it was finished I put it on, and I went quiet in the way that I have since watched happen to other people- the particular stillness that arrives when something reaches you from the inside and stops the usual noise for a moment.

I understood then that what I was making was not a hobby. It was not a sideline. It was the place where everything I had ever learned – about stones, about fashion, about beauty, about what it means for a woman to wear something that is completely and irreplaceably hers – had finally arrived at the same point.

That amethyst piece is still with me. Some things you keep not because you can’t sell them but because they were never really for sale. They were for understanding.

Lisa Marie Armstrong makes one-of-a-kind wearable art jewelry from her studio on Lake Zurich. Each piece is built from real stones and worked by hand — made once, never repeated.