This necklace started with a box of gold ovals that were never meant to be mine.

A fellow jeweler had been sitting on a large inventory of 24k gold vermeil ovals. She had bought them for her best-selling design at the time, a boho earring called Feather Leathers, where custom-cut leather hung whimsically from the ovals with gemstones draping below. Then she pivoted her whole business to custom engagement rings and retired the earrings for good. The ovals had nowhere to go. I took a number of them off her hands, because I cannot watch a beautiful material go unused, and I knew they would find a home in my one-of-a-kind work.

I just had to figure out what that home was.

Finding the shape

I played with the ovals for a while, arranging and rearranging, until a pattern emerged that wanted to be a collar. A collar sits differently than my usual asymmetric pieces. It asks for symmetry, for a center that anchors everything, so I knew from the start it needed a cluster at its heart.

I was excited, because I had just bought something perfect to build that cluster around: strands of Mixed Beryl crown-cut beads, tiny faceted geometric stones in aquamarine, morganite, and heliodor.

Gemstone science: one mineral, three colors

Here is something I love about those beads. Aquamarine, morganite, and heliodor are all the same mineral, beryl. The color is the only thing that separates them: aquamarine is beryl tinted blue by iron, morganite is beryl blushed peach by manganese, and heliodor is beryl warmed to yellow. So a single strand of them is one stone wearing three moods, which makes them a quietly perfect foundation for a cluster where color is meant to lead.

The part the stones decided

I had a grand plan for the center, and the stones talked me out of it.

The first idea was dramatic: a large amethyst stalactite slice suspended from a cascade of ovals dropping from the center point, turning the collar into an opera-length statement. I built toward it, but the proportions never came right. The drop fought the collar instead of flowing from it. So I let the grand version go and kept it simpler, a single graceful drop instead of a cascade.

Then the beryls fought me too. The first two crown-cut beads I tried to wire in snapped under the tension. They are lovely but delicate at that tiny size, so I changed my whole order of operations. I built the cluster's structure first with sturdier stones to set the shape, then threaded the fragile beryls in one at a time, after the framework could protect them. A stone always teaches you how it wants to be handled. You just have to listen before you have broken two.

Building outward

With the drop simplified, I framed a large aquamarine nugget inside the central oval, edged that oval with tiny sparkling purple Herkimer diamonds, and secured the cluster to both the drop and the two ovals flanking it.

I had meant to leave those flanking ovals open, but once the cluster and drop came together, the empty space inside them looked unfinished. So I reached for baroque pearls shaped almost like little angel wings and let them extend the cluster outward on either side, filling the openness with movement. That accident of proportion became one of my favorite parts of the piece.

From there I set a rhythm down the length of the collar: ovals edged in 3mm mystic labradorite beads with gemstones threaded through the center, alternating with open ovals each holding a single larger stone. One held a blue topaz, the next a copper aquamarine, chosen because they echoed each other in size, shape, and watery color. I carried the pattern to the point where the necklace slips behind the neck, then finished the rest of the length with bare gold ovals, letting the design quiet down before it disappears.

Why this one is one of a kind

This necklace could not happen twice. The ovals came from a design that no longer exists, bought in a quantity that will eventually run out. The beryls that survived the bench are set in an order I worked out by breaking the ones that did not. The angel-wing pearls are there because an empty space asked to be filled. Every choice was a response to the one before it, which is the only way I know how to work, and the reason no two of my pieces are ever the same.

It is a collar built entirely from beginnings that belonged to someone else, made wholly into something that is only mine.

Vermeil Oval earrings (mate to the Vermeil Oval Collar necklace)

These carry one quiet detail straight from the necklace's body. I edged each 24k gold vermeil oval with tiny sparkling purple Herkimer diamonds and suspended a single baroque pearl to hang in the center, the same gesture that runs along the collar, distilled into a single oval per ear.