About

Hello and welcome to our handmade collection!

As you may have seen in our "About us" page, we carry pieces from around the world, but also design and manufacture our own, right here in the USA.

My name is Norma and I taught myself the art of jewelry wax carving over the last 6 or 7 years. It started out very slowly in the beginning, with just a couple of pendants here and there, when I could find the time to work on them while also running this business.

Like many people who never felt like any career path was quite the right fit, it has taken me a long time to get here - to a place where I finally feel like this is what I should have been doing all along.

norma cheung, at work office studio

Creating these tiny and detailed wax models for jewelry has become my passion and it is also when I feel like I enter a "zen-like" state, where hours and days seem to go by and I'm not aware of the passage of time. Nothing else in my life has ever felt the way jewelry carving makes me feel - as if this is what I was born to do.

wax carving tools

The thing I love most about wax carving is the great level of detail that can be achieved. But I also love that when I finish, the pieces seem to have a kind of "spirit", seen in the tiny imperfections and variations that happen in the process of being created by hand.

some of my wax jewelry models wax model next to finished silver piece

There are two kinds of pendants in my handmade silver collection - ones that are made of metal clay silver and ones that are cast in sterling silver via the ancient lost wax process. You can read more about the two kinds of pendants here.

I also enjoy the art of wire-wrapping. This process uses various shapes and sizes of wire (usually copper) to both create a design on a stone and to secure it in place.

Wire wrapping a raw blue celestite crystal

What I enjoy about wire-wrapping is having to respond to the unique shape, size, color, and quality of each stone, as they are all different. I see each stone as precious in its own way and a special gift of the earth.

I hope that gives you a little insight into my work. Thank you for visiting and I hope that you enjoy it as much as I enjoy creating it.
Norma

Go to my Handmade Silver collection.
Go to my Wire Wrapped Jewelry collection.