In the Studio with Grace Atwood of the Stripe

Recently we had the pleasure of hosting blogger Grace Atwood of the Stripe in the Loren Hope Studio. We’ve always been a huge fan of Grace not only for her down to earth personality and killer sense of style but her love of everything DIY.

We don’t often share the behind the scenes of our process, so it was a treat to invite Grace (and her mom) to see how Loren Hope jewelry is made. Grace did a great blog post on her visit and shared some of the history of the Rhode Island jewelry industry here.  We set up a station for Grace to pick from that included different beads, settings, chains, links and other components from our library and let her get to work creating her own piece of jewelry.

Once Grace decided on her stones, Loren talked her through the process of design. “It’s a practice of considering form, color, texture, practicality and functionality. This is the part of my job I love. Just get creative and let yourself play. If you don’t like it, try something new!” explained Loren. After a little practice, Grace was a natural, laying out stones and deciding on a color palette for her pendant necklace.

Loren and Grace talked through her design and played with various layouts of different color stones and chains. Once Grace decided on a design for her pendant a member of the LH team went to work soldering her piece in the studio.

After the pendant was soldered we showed Grace how stones are hand set using traditional methods. The same methods we use on all of our LH pieces.

Grace even took a turn at setting some of her own stones. We then sent her piece off to be plated at one of our Rhode Island factories.

How pretty is the finished product?! You can see the pendant necklace styled by Grace and featured in her recent blog post. We love her choice of stones – the color combination of transparent, blush vintage glass stones against the main opal center stone paired with masculine, geometric box chain, makes for a feminine cluster pendant that goes with literally everything (especially navy) and feels truly artisan and special. Two things we can get behind.