As I perused the Web for opal jewelry, I stumbled upon this image of a high-karat gold bib festooned with boulder opals. It took my breath away, so I clicked through to find out more about the designer.
Carolyn Tyler is a native Californian who moved to Indonesia after falling in love with beautiful Bali. Her designs are executed there by skilled Balinese craftsmen, using high-karat gold, sterling silver, and gemstones. My kind of gig, let me tell you! It would be my dream to have a workshop full of talented goldsmiths who would take my drawings and turn them into three-dimensional works of art.
Carolyn's designs are very much within my personal aesthetic, and indeed there are similarities in the materials we prefer to use as well. I love to use fossil ammonites and asymmetrically-shaped boulder opals, stones that, as Carolyn says, have spirit. They are also some of the most beautiful things that nature has to offer.
Whereas the stones she uses in her designs are not precisely-cut or otherwise flawless, her designs are. They are a wonderful, carefully balanced, melange of colorful gemstones set in sunny yellow metal adorned with the ancient technique of applying hundreds of miniscule orbs of gold known as
granulation. Her pieces can take weeks or months to complete, and the results are worth every minute.
See more of Ms. Tyler's jewelry by visiting her Web site at
carolyntylerjewelry.com. (Her site design is also pretty great, IMHO.)
