![]() McDonough likes to make her jewelry more affordable – at Edgewood, her works range from approximately $110 to $6,500. So what I did was stagger them, and then there’s a hook so you could wear just a simple little thing, but using the hooks you can make it longer.” “The baguette is the least-expensive diamond because it’s hard to find a way to use it. She does something similar with earrings. It looks like a five-carat diamond, but because it’s made up of smaller, less expensive stones, it can sell for $6,500, whereas a single five-carat diamond could be about $120,000. “We fabricated a cage with little channels in it, and then the diamonds fit tightly into the channels, and they butt up to each other without metal showing,” McDonough said. She pulls out a ring with what appears to be a huge diamond. It depicts a Samoan fruit bat mother hanging in a tree with her pup – a fitting image for the pandemic, she thought. To commemorate COVID-19, McDonough has bought a small supply of 2020 quarters honoring the National Park of American Samoa. And she has an eye for the unusual – a bright vintage paper-clip money clip as a pendant, or Wisconsin deer tags as earrings. She might leave stones in their raw state, for example, and surround them with a bright, highly polished bezel. ![]() This became very popular, and you can see a lot of people in Door County wearing it.” “And I carved it in a piece of marble, and each piece is cast using the lost-wax method. “I came up with this motif – it looks a lot like the tree of life,” McDonough said. She started with a design for the tree of life based on a Shel Silverstein story called The Giving Tree. After she had two sons, 13 months apart, her husband, Tim, suggested she quit her financial-services job and make jewelry full time. “I’m always surprised when someone picks up a centerpiece and combines it with something I’d never think of,” McDonough said.Īfter she started making jewelry for herself, women would ask her whether she could make something for them. The range of choices expands greatly when customers bring in their own treasures. “The earrings work the same way,” she said, “with lots of different ways to hang the angles off of studs.” She also designed a coupler for jewels that was tucked out of sight, but it allows an owner to combine jewels and rearrange them at will. McDonough’s collection at the gallery has 30 or 40 strands of necklaces and 10 different centerpieces, resulting in a choice of at least 300 different combinations just from that inventory. Once a person gets the concept and realizes that he or she can almost self-design their look, it becomes really fun and quite collectible.” “This is where I learned that the ideas really lend themselves to customization and collaboration. The jewelry created by Marcia McDonough is made to come apart to allow wearers to mix and match pieces or incorporate their own special pieces into it. ![]() I started to have people make appointments to come in with family heirlooms – brooches, pearls, rings – and they’d want to make their special pieces work with the concept. “About a decade ago, Nell started an appointment book for me, and that really helped. ![]() “The consultative relationship is probably most important to me, and Edgewood Orchard is perfect for that,” McDonough said. For McDonough – who had made a career in financial planning at American Express and MetLife – explaining is a polished skill that she has transferred to her jewelry business. That usually requires some explaining about how this interchangeability works and what advantages it provides to a buyer. “All of my jewelry comes apart – it’s interchangeable – so you can wear things in different ways,” she said. Jewelry maker Marcia McDonough said that Edgewood Orchard Galleries in Fish Creek is the perfect place to sell her creations. ![]()
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