I have named hundreds of pieces over the years. This one refused to let me.

So I did something I had never done before. I showed it to the people on my email list before it was fully finished, and I asked them to name it for me. That is a vulnerable thing to do. The name is usually mine to give, the last quiet decision I make at the bench. Handing it over meant trusting that the people who follow my work would see in the piece what I saw in it. They did, and then some.

This is the story of how that necklace came to be, and how it earned the name it carries now: Fairy Dynamite.

A piece that picked up where the last release left off

The investment I make in my art is more precious than paint and canvases. Gemstones are sold in strands. Creating a lush palette for a new collections requires multiple strands. I work hard to honor the full use of each tiny treasure that ends up on my studio desk. I call this using the ‘whole buffalo’, much like the Native Americans who honored the life sustaining yields as a result of their hunting practices. When I buy gemstones for a collection, I am not finished with that collection until I have found a home for nearly all of them. This necklace is proof of that habit. It picks up exactly where my last pastel release left off, and it began with two components I had already made and set aside.

The two clusters at its heart were originally built for an ear cuff. Each one stacked a large, simple-cut blue topaz with geometric Australian opal briolettes, piled one on the next like stones in a river cairn. They were beautiful, and they were wrong for that ear cuff. Their chunky weight clashed with the delicate frame I had designed, so I used tiny opal rondelles and cascading gold chains for that piece instead. The two heavy clusters went onto my desk, where they sat and waited until I could find a design that honored how substantial they were.

Building the necklace around them

The answer was to return to the thing I do most naturally: my signature asymmetrical gemstone clustering.

The chains came first, and they were the real spark. I had an organic-shaped pearl chain whose knobby, irregular rhythm matched the cairn-like stack of the Australian opals almost exactly. The moment I held them next to each other, the necklace existed in my head. I added two 24k gold vermeil components as the connection points that carry the main cluster out to a pair of those chains.

Then came the part that is never optional. Once a cluster is built, I go back in and strategically add stones so the whole thing flows without any visual stutter. I built up the joins between the original cluster and the new main cluster, and I threaded tiny Australian opals through the design as single points of cohesion, small echoes that tie one area to the next.

My plan had been to simply attach the two pearl chains and stop there. I have a very hard time doing anything standard. So I added gemstones along the chains to break their monotony, and then the chains read as too heavy. To put the air back in, I added a single gold circle link. That link is what I call a Marilyn: one unexpected element that breaks the pattern and makes you look twice. Every piece needs one.

Around that blue topaz and opal core, the finished cluster gathers aquamarine, amethyst, kunzite, mystic labradorite, and keshi pearls, the soft pastel family I keep coming back to.

A note on the stones

Moonstone is one of the soft, glowing stones running through this necklace, and it earns its place. Its dreamy sheen has a name, adularescence, and it comes from the way moonstone is built in microscopic layers of two feldspar minerals. Light enters, scatters between those layers, and floats back to your eye as that glow that seems to hover just below the surface. No two moonstones scatter light in quite the same way, which is exactly why they belong in a piece that exists only once.

Handing it to the community

When the necklace was nearly there, I sent it to my list and asked a simple question: what would you name her? I made it easy to answer. No external poll, no form, just hit reply.

I was not prepared for what came back. Names arrived full of imagination and personal meaning. Jenny Blanchard, who would end up naming the winner, wrote that the piece gave her "the sensation of being from another world where fairies are busy at work." Other subscribers reached for mythology, for wine, for gratitude, for the night sky. Every single name came with a little story about why.

So I sent a second email. I listed every name that had been submitted, each with a short description so no one felt left out, and I let the community vote.

Fairy Dynamite

They chose Fairy Dynamite, a name Jenny submitted.

It fit better than anything I would have landed on alone. From across a room the necklace looks delicate and a little innocent, all soft blues and lilacs and pearl. Up close it is anything but quiet. It explodes into color and texture and weight. Delicate and explosive at the same time. Fairy Dynamite.

The part that mattered most

After the vote, I did not simply move on to the next thing. I wrote fifteen personal thank-you notes, each one from my own inbox rather than an automated send, and each one spoke to that person's specific submission. Then I made something for every contributor: a custom Andrea Li Designs certificate naming them, the piece, its stones, and the exact name they had submitted or voted for. Sixteen people, sixteen certificates.

I did this because these were never entries in a contest to me. They were people who handed me their imagination, and I wanted them to hold something that said so. The replies that came back told me it landed.

A name, and a piece, that are truly one of a kind

Fairy Dynamite is one piece in the collection I am releasing this fall, the next chapter of the pastel work I began with Tamar. Like everything I make, it exists exactly once. The stones in it will never gather in the same way again, and the design will never be repeated.

There is something right about a one-of-a-kind piece being named by the people who will remember it. The reason the world treasures a singular jewel is the same reason I make what I make. It will only ever be itself. And now it carries a name to match, given to it by the community that watched it come together.