Leah Ashley Jewelry Designs Creates Stunning Custom Jewelry

The last piece I finished for a customer would fall into the catagory of “Grandmother’s Jewelry.” It may sound silly but it is a fun way for grandmothers (or grandfather if they are into jewelry) to express their love for their grandchildren through jewelry.

For this piece I was working with a woman I know from jazzercise. I’ve known her for about a year now so I was super excited when she said she wanted to have a piece of jewelry made. She has 3 grown children who have started to have children themselves. Like most grandparents, her grandkids are definitely a light in her life and she wanted a pendant to represent each one of them. The problem was that her kids are finished having kids so the pendant had to be designed in a way that she could add stones to but that would look good before it was full of stones also. She currently has two grandchildren that were born in June (alexandrite), one who was born in September (sapphire), and one who was born in January (garnet). On the right are 2 ideas that I came up with to solved this problem. The top pendant is actually individual pieces that can be soldered together as they are added. This idea has unlimited space for adding more pieces but if there are too many, the pendant could get really wide. The second piece (the heart) has a surface design with holes in it so it easy to add flush set stones into the holes as more stones are called for but the pieces doesn’t look funny if all of the holes aren’t filled. My client has 3 children and she thought 8 stones would probably be the maximum needed but I designed the piece to hold 13 just in case–plus having 1 hole not filled might not look as good as if there are 5 holes not filled.

She decided to go with the heart design because she liked the idea of a heart and while the heart was a little bit more money to get started, it was less expensive to add stones to so in the long run it will probably end up being less expensive.

I think the piece turned out really nicely and the colors worked together much better than anyone expected. I am looking forward to adding more stones to this pieces as my client has more grandchildren!