Caroline Streep’s pieces are hand fabricated and textured by fusing, reticulation, forging, chiseling, and carving on the surface. A necklace from Streep’s Cornflower series, of sterling silver, 18K gold, and pearls; 10" long. Photo by Ralph Gabriner

No matter which direction the jewelry industry swings, or what fashion experts forecast, the not-so-simple matter of personal perspective is one element that is not so easily quantified. What ultimately attracts a customer to a particular piece of jewelry is anyone’s guess. Designers only can do their best at being true to their creative impetus and inner judgment and hope
that sales follow suit.

But when you take current trends out of the picture, one thing basically never changes: a person’s body size relative to the jewelry that he or she chooses to wear. Is there an equation, a recipe for success that can meld the two? How do designers work with issues of size — for example, fitting delicate pieces to larger-framed bodies or large pieces to petite frames? Are there special techniques to help accomplish this task without destroying the design concept or original creative intention?

I set out to get to the bottom of this size issue. As I spoke to various jewelry designers, educators, and others in the field, I watched as my own size grew from a tall, medium-framed body into a tall, pregnant-framed body. As my belly expanded, I wondered if my own taste in jewelry would change. Would I want to wear larger pieces to compensate? Would I stop wearing that favorite Nancy Anderson necklace? What would I do when my wedding ring, designed by my husband, no longer fit? Would there come a time when I felt I didn’t care, that adornment was simply a waste of time?

Caroline Streep’s Masai Queen earrings, of sterling silver, 18K & 22K gold, bronze, Montana agate, and freshwater pearls; 3-1/4" x 1-1/8". Photos: Ralph Gabriner.

SELF-CONFIDENCE, SELF-IMAGE. “My experience has always been that it’s the self-confidence and image a person wants to project that dictates what they wear. It’s not really about a person’s height or weight,” says designer Caroline Streep, who, since I last talked to her for Lapidary Journal’s 2000 jewelry design issue, has moved into a deluxe new studio space in the heart of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Streep has mastered the art of combining unusual, eye-popping stones with sophisticated metalwork.

“Back in the ‘80s, I was doing my artwork without a vague concept of marketing,” she says. “I worked big; all of my earrings were four inches long, like mobiles with projected images. After the stock market crashed, there was a conservative element that moved into design. Pieces became smaller and you saw more high-karat gold and gems. People still wanted to show it, but not in that same exuberant way so common in the ‘80s.

“Now things are turning around again and we’re getting into larger sizes, which makes me enormously happy because I like working big! But, it’s really about a personal sense of self when it comes to what people want. Some of my biggest necklaces have gone to women who aren’t afraid to make a statement. If you’re wearing a necklace with big gold and silver constructions, for example, or 14 strands of coral, you could put on one of the Italian designers with a long tunic top and slim skirt and a pair of heels so that the proportions work together. A beautiful, simple long garment works very well with a giant necklace. My clients who wear larger jewelry generally have the wardrobe to go with larger pieces. They're interested in style and are savvy about fashion.”

Tom Muir, a metals professor at Bowling Green State University, agrees that wardrobe can have a big impact on the presence of jewelry. “When it comes to size, there’s an issue in terms of the types of clothing that jewelry can be comfortably worn on. You need to consider when a piece of jewelry is too heavy for the fabric. A lot of the jewelry that I see contemporary artists making isn’t necessarily practical. Size depends on the clientele and on how educated they are, or how daring they may be to wear larger pieces.” Muir, who also teaches at North Carolina’s Penland School of Crafts, lectures around the country and has his own work in the White House Craft Collection, continues, “There are a lot of cultures that use very large earrings, for example, that people in our society wouldn't think of wearing. A lot of people aren’t willing to wear jewelry that’s unusual.”

Metalsmith Tom Muir works with stones in commissioned pieces, and finds that adding any new element requires attention to proportion. Neckpiece of 18K yellow and white gold and diamonds; 2-1/4" x 1-1/8" x 1/2". From the collection of Ann Eastman.

Although Muir is primarily a metalsmith, he works with stones in his commissioned pieces and says that adding any new element always requires attention to proportion. “When looking at the piece you’re creating, there are all kinds of resources to help with perspective, such as machinery, architecture, and nature. I have my students look at all varieties of sources in their work, as far as proportion and scale. Balance is just one of the elements of composition. You can create balance using asymmetry, too. With earrings you can consider mobiles and baby toys, for example, where asymmetry works beautifully as a form of balance. You can also use color or negative space to achieve visual balance.”

While Muir observes that other cultures use larger earrings as an adornment staple, Streep feels there is a way to be comfortable with larger earrings in our own society, regardless of the size of the woman. “With someone who is five feet tall, you have to be careful with proportion,” she adds. “There are smaller women who want something scaled down, but in my experience, it’s all about self-image. Some very petite ladies have really out-there personalities. They’re not going to let size intimidate them. The only time I see size come into play is when a woman feels she does not have a long enough neck to carry off a three-inch pair of earrings. I’m 5'4" and I don’t have a long neck. But, I think my best look is a long, narrow earring about 31û2" long by 3û4" wide. If you’re self-conscious about your chin, or feel you have a short neck, you might have to shy away from an earring that long.”

When it comes to wearing smaller or larger pieces for special occasions, as opposed to every day, Streep doesn’t see a difference. “My clients tend to wear my jewelry every day. Sometimes they buy a piece thinking they’re going to wear it for special occasions. But they love it so much that it becomes a signature piece that they wear all of the time. I’ve heard it for 20 years now. My jewelry doesn’t tend to be something you can only wear to the ball.”

Brooch of Imperial jasper, amethyst, and carved 18K gold by Tom Herman; 3-1/4" x 2-1/2". Photo: Ralph Gabriner.

MATERIALS & PROPORTION. What about the materials used in a piece of jewelry? Do they affect the size and proportion of the piece, or how it will appear on the wearer? Jewelry designers often remark that it’s the stone that dictates how a piece evolves. Designer Tom Herman, based in New York’s Hudson Valley area, weaves a reverence for special stones with the traditional techniques of chasing, engraving, and saw-piercing into what can be aptly described as miniature sculptures with traces of ancient architecture. Given a quick glance at a photo, a brooch could easily double as a palace entrance or a nice fireplace mantel if you didn’t know it was a two-inch-tall piece of jewelry you were spying. Herman’s designs seem to simultaneously work with and transcend the notion of size.

“Proportion is secondary to the life of a piece. It’s more important to have a piece of jewelry that’s in proportion to itself, just like a carving,” Herman observes. “You want a certain amount to balance the stone. I was told in school, if you’re a sculptor you should be able to roll your sculpture down the stairs and not have anything break off. It’s much more important for pieces to be balanced within themselves. Basically, jewelry is sculpture that people wear on their bodies. Jewelry should be just as interesting from five feet away as five inches away, with the right silhouette, colors, contrast, balance, and negative spaces to end up with something that’s interesting at all angles.”

Tom Herman’s brooch of Lobo agate, golden agate, and carved 18K gold; 2-1/2" x 1-5/8". Photo: Ralph Gabriner.

Several of Herman's designs can be viewed on his Web site, which sports his business moniker, Seven Fingers (based on his own number of digits, the result of a childhood accident), and associated hand logo, reminiscent of a present-day pictograph. His brooches suggest an essence of Egyptian, ancient Roman and French court design flavors. Laurel leaves reminiscent of carved friezes and festoons from Greek architecture and marble palaces speak to the subconscious, Herman believes. “Imagine how long such images hung on peoples’ houses. They’re at the base root of our psyches. It’s the same with architecture. We want to say that we’re modernists, but there’s nothing really new under the sun. I guess I try to tap into that base root and put my own spin on it.”

Does the stone dictate jewelry design for Herman? Yes and no. “Sometimes you fall in love with a stone that you just don’t want to cut down, until you find that right person. A lot of pieces dictate how they will be made. I got a stone from Martin Koning, for instance. All of his stones have a distinctive drama to them. This stone was so big. I had already cut 3û4" off of it and I just couldn’t cut any more. The piece I made ended up being almost 4" x 5". It was a huge brooch. Although I had it for a while, the woman who bought it just loved the drama, and she wasn’t a very large person.

“I'm trying a balancing act of enhancing the stone, while still using the power of the stone to say most of the message. I use a lot of agate, transparent more than opaque, imperial jasper, Priday plume agate, and boulder opals. Although it all pretty much starts with the stone itself, when talking about proportion, you have to go with what you find and make pieces to accommodate the size of the stone. It doesn’t do any good to cut an important stone.”

So what's important to Herman is the proportions of the stone, not necessarily the proportions of the wearer. Let the jewelry take care of itself, and it will find a home — and who wears the piece will depend on who connects with it emotionally, rather than their physical size. “Since I just do retail sales, I meet my customers at shows. It’s such a tragedy not to know your customers. People will tell you what they think. It’s a blessing and a curse! The most important feedback, I think, is to see who gets your work and who doesn’t. The carving is what I truly love and its intricacy. Some people just don’t get it. Others see it from 50 feet away and I can tell they’ve locked onto something,” Herman sums up.

WORKING FOR SCALE. Is there a bottom line to what’s right or wrong when it comes to proportion and size? Sharon Church, a professor in the Crafts Department at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, is interested in adornment that engages the wearer through the symbolic language of form.

“Scale. I call it scale,” Church says when asked about size. “In some ways, I think scale often has to do with the jewelry maker and what feels comfortable in the hand of the maker. I see us working from there onto the body. When I work, I use a mannequin of an average female size of about five-feet-six-inches tall that would weigh around 130 pounds. Working on the mannequin, I have a real sense of how the piece is looking on the human form. It’s an incredibly helpful tool for me because I deal a lot with gravity and movement in my work. If a piece of jewelry is not working on a physical body, that’s critical for me to know right away.

“I don’t necessarily think that small pieces need to go with small bodies. Sometimes when there’s an overly large piece of jewelry on a small body, it’s a really stunning aspect of the piece because of the contrast. It’s all about the relationship of the piece to the human form.” Church admits, however, that her position frees her from the concerns of selling the finished piece. “Since I’m not a commercial jeweler, I need to get less involved with the marketing aspects. My approach is a little different. I don’t start with the stone. My approach is more about the structure and form, so the human becomes the site. Weight, as in the weight of the piece, is a huge issue for me since I work so large. If the piece isn’t comfortable, no one will wear it. I spend a lot of time making my jewelry comfortable and useable. Jewelry is body-dependent; it hangs from the body. When I use the neck area, I recognize it as an area of burden. You have to yoke it and transform it from its traditional usage.”

Night Mountains collar, 7-1/2" x 7-1/2" x 21û2".by beadworker Sage Sundance. Photo courtesy Sundance Designs.

Bead artist Sage Sundance works miracles in her own transformation of the neck from that traditional site of burden to a showpiece for her delicate yet earthy contemporary seed bead creations of intricate peyote stitch. Her unusual and contemporary designs put a new face on this traditional diagonal-weave beading technique.

“Size is not really an issue when designing my work, nor is it really an issue when I sell it. It’s the size of the attitude that makes a difference. I have large pieces that women my size (5'2") look great in and buy. In my head, I think that larger women will gravitate to larger pieces, but it doesn’t seem to end up that way. One particularly large choker of mine was tried on by a smaller woman and looked stunning. If it fits and suits the person, it really doesn’t matter,” says Sundance, who has worked as a bead artist for the past 10 years.

Most of Sundance’s necklaces, chokers, and collars begin by being stitched into tubular constructions that are then formed into unusually patterned pieces of jewelry in an earth-tone palette with metallic accents. A metal (brass or steel) sub-structure is inside most of the tubes of stitched beads. Self-taught, she learned to do peyote stitch from a book years ago and has taken various workshops at the Penland School of Crafts. Raised in a family of artists, her early days were spent in a cradle in a booth at craft fairs where her parents exhibited their calligraphy and pressed flowers. Recent trends toward smaller jewelry haven’t affected Sundance’s designs. “My work has gotten considerably larger since I started. I still make smaller pieces that sell well, but that’s pretty much due to pricing,” she adds.

STRIKING A BALANCE. Finally, husband-and-wife team Stacia and Larry Woods reflect their natural surroundings in the Texas hill country in jewelry that features Larry’s “medicine wheel” and “spiral gem” cuts and Stacia’s design work. Using a variety of stones, such as garnets, sapphires, drusy quartz, chalcedony, onyx, and pearls with 18-karat gold, sterling silver, and platinum, gives the Woodses an opportunity to experiment with size.

“When you look at a ring and think, ‘How am I going to wear this?’ it’s obviously not a comfortable everyday piece. One of the most challenging size issues is when someone wants a very large stone set in a ring. It usually turns into more of a mechanical feat than a design because there’s not a lot of room for design. With a large stone, you want to set it as close to the skin as possible,” says Stacia.

“Sometimes people don’t really know what will work for them. There’s always that balance of listening to the customer, who’s always right, and using your own experience to steer them in the right direction, if you don’t think what they want will work. Sometimes I try things, like when I’ve made waxes where the customer didn’t like it once it was cast. It was a case of the customer not being able to visualize how the piece would look in metal. As a designer, I tend to like to make big, bold pieces. Usually, the stone dictates the design, especially if I’m working with an unusual piece that Larry has cut. I try to complement what he’s cut, as well as do what the customer wants. It’s a lot of fun letting the stone and customer dictate where the design is going. It opens up a lot of new ideas.

“Most people have the common sense to want something that will complement their bodies. Occasionally, a small woman will want a large stone on her hand. A lot of times, a very small woman will see a large ring, but might ask if I have a smaller stone to accommodate her body. If they fall in love with the stone, but it’s too large for their hand, I try to convince them to put it around their neck on a long chain,” says Stacia.

According to Larry Woods, where size really comes into play is with price. “If you’re cutting large stones and working on material that sells per karat, that increases the price and size becomes an issue. When I’m cutting stones that I’m really interested in, I do think about the salability.

Things that are too large are difficult to sell,” he says. “There’s definitely a size limit. Most people prefer jewelry that isn’t huge. Right now, I’m combining faceting and carving, like the fantasy cuts I do with garnets. One cut that I developed, the medicine wheel, works really well with highly saturated colors, like garnets. For my carvings, I tend to use larger pieces for pins and brooches. I’ve been cutting since 1980 and in the end, we always build the piece to match the customer. Usually they pick the stone and that’s where we start.”

So there you have it. The relevance of the size of a piece of jewelry to the wearer may depend on one’s self-image, price, the seduction of the stone, visual balance, a sense of fashion, or some other, deeper, unexplainable motivation. As for my own matter of size, as my baby grew and my belly expanded, my taste in jewelry remained pretty much the same. I continued wearing my favorite everyday pieces, but sometimes opted for larger earrings as my pregnancy progressed. When my wedding ring reached the finger strangulation point, I switched to an interim band of similar width and mass. I even found myself doubling up on necklaces from time to time, just to feel a little more colorful. My efforts may have gone unnoticed. My objective was to express my inner sense of self, regardless of size, which leads me back to the beginning of this odyssey on perspective. It seems, at least in this context, the answer to the elusive question has been found: Size doesn’t really matter, after all.

The jewelers whose work is shown in this article are: Caroline Streep, (505) 989-5050; Stacia & Larry Woods, PO Box 1155, Blanco, TX 78607, www.jewelsbywoods.com; Tom Herman, PO Box 700, Stone Ridge, NY, 12484, www.sevenfingers.com; Sage Sundance, (501) 677-3084, www.sundancedesigns.com; Tom Muir, (419) 837-9224.