We are thrilled this year to be offering Dilia Salvador’s work for the first time! Dilia finds inspiration for her jewelry in nature, in folk art, in other cultures, and loves working in many mediums. She can look at anything and envision it as a form for jewelry. “Ideas make ideas”, she says, and believes in the collective consciousness of working and sharing.
Dilia learned the craft of metalsmithing in her native Chile. A member of the Boulder Arts and Crafts Cooperative as a jeweler since 1981, Dilia has been branching out into bead-weaving, fiber jewelry (such as the jewel-like bracelets (pictured right) she makes from sari silk!), and combining indigo and eco-dying to make artful silk scarves. Her beautiful cards are monoprints, each one an original, one-of-a-kind work of art.
Eve has been weaving for several years now, satisfying her fiber addiction and design aptitude by weaving distinctive scarves from unique and unusual natural-fiber yarns. She has designed many of her scarves to feature locally handspun and hand dyed yarns, often from local farms raising alpacas, llamas and sheep. 
Eve discovered Pebble Art Jewelry when she was lured into their little shop by an arresting display of jewelry made from ancient Roman glass. This year Kate Head brings us wonderful pieces featuring fragments of 1200 year old Roman era glass from the Mediterranean region in gorgeous shades of blues, greens and iridescent pearl combined with modern styling, and at very reasonable prices.
Artisan Renée McDougall of Longmont became interested in crafting with glass while working at the Stained Glass Supply Company. At her home studio, she works mostly in fused glass, a process that can take up to 11 hours from start to finish.
Retuned Jewelry makes striking, stylish bracelets, earrings and necklaces for gals and guys from repurposed, used guitar strings. Did you know that because of the various alloys used to make guitar strings, they are extremely difficult to recycle? At least 700 tons of strings end up in the dump every year. Retuned works with local musicians and music shops to collect used strings that would have otherwise been thrown away. Their jewelry, made by Christina Lacey and her husband in Frederick CO, gives these hard-working strings new life and allows their stories to live on. We think they are a perfect fit for our Holiday Gift Market, don’t you?
Alexa Varano paints her original designs on each individual piece of sustainably and ethically produced clothing with a paintbrush in her Denver studio – no screen-printing here!