The Review Connection | Review: Wendy Grace Jewelry

Wendy Grace Jewelry

Sweet Seduction by One Sculptor’s Graceful Jewelry

Wendy Grace Jewelry captures quality, craftsmanship, and creative design. Her pieces are uniquely original and classic rather than being the “trend of the moment” as everything from her styles, forms, colors, and designs stand apart. Wendy Tabb Grace is the sole creator and designer of her pieces. Her style of jewelry is contemporary, artistic, and feminine, mainly consisting of sterling silver, gold-filled metals, vintage beads, and semi-precious and precious gemstones. Whether her materials consist of high quality faceted gemstone beads to funky organic nuggets, Wendy says, “I really enjoy mixing metals, using silver and gold together. It gives the pieces depth and more versatility.” Wendy Grace Jewelry has been featured in fashion magazines such as In Style, Marie Claire, New York, Elle, and more. Wendy keeps her classic styles current and launches three major collections a year.

Since Wendy’s childhood, she has always loved music, stories, art classes, and would surely create her own treasures from whatever materials she could find. Her mother and brother are also artists, and her family has never stopped supporting and encouraging her creativity. Born in San Francisco, and growing up in Arizona, Wendy left to explore the big city lifestyle. Her dabbling in jewelry began when she took a few art classes while attending UCLA as a Fine Arts major. As “Three Dimensional Form” was her favorite class, she became intrigued with texture and metals, and Wendy Grace Jewelry began crocheting wire into sheets of mesh to use for sculptures. Wendy loved the look and feel of the crocheted wire because it was pliable and soft yet a hard metal with great texture and form. As a hobby, Wendy began making jewelry out of her handmade mesh for friends and herself. One of our Editor’s Picks is the Crochet Ring, an elegant and feminine piece with its wide band of crochet vermeil wire all around. This is a lovely and adorning piece captures the beauty of raw wire interwoven throughout, without being bulky. This ring is so lightweight that you will not even feel as if you were wearing it.

Wendy’s personal favorites change from time to time. Currently, she has been devoting her creative energy towards designing bracelets with a love of free and flowing movement to them. Wendy Grace Jewelry For a burst of color, the Beaded Bracelet is sure to garner attention as it is made of hematite, pyrite, vintage crystal and glass, horn, and agate all along a gold-fill chain. This bracelet dangles loosely on the wrist, but the colors of strawberry red, charcoal gray, and metal copper cannot be missed. As one can see from her extensive collection of earrings, Wendy also has a fondness for them as well because they can add depths of personality in framing one’s face. Because the essence of movement is important in earrings, she likes it when “beads dangle, chains sway elegantly, metal casts have sexy shapes to them” so that her pieces feel like they dance. The Tiny Disc Earrings does very that as it dances and sways with every turn. These earrings showcase four tiny oval discs in sterling silver linked together vertically with a cluster of five miniature silver beads at the bottom. The coolness of the shiny metal is clean and modern.

Wendy Grace Jewelry After two years in Los Angeles, Wendy transferred to Parsons School of Design in New York City. In debating between the design or fine arts department, she chose the latter as that was where her passion was. She found her calling in the sculpture department as she had the opportunity to work with steel and thick copper wire and developed a love for welding. Wendy spent countless hours in the metal shop welding large-scale linear sculptures using steel rods and described it as “drawing in the air." Post-graduation, Wendy exhibited her sculptures in galleries throughout New York City and museums throughout the country. Over time, her large scale architectural sculptures transformed into smaller, more intimate pieces with thinner lines. She wasn’t making a living selling her sculpture, so she worked various jobs to make ends meet. In 1998 she started making jewelry on the side and eventually took a chance and quit her job to launch her own company and design jewelry fulltime. New York was her home for twenty years before she returned to Phoenix, Arizona in 2003.

Despite attending Parsons, Wendy was focused on fine art then and only took one formal jewelry class in her first year there. Wendy recalls, “I really enjoyed the class, but didn’t think it would be my career… Once I started my jewelry company, I had to learn ‘on the job’. I think this led to really exciting jewelry design because of the organic process of learning something on your own.” Wendy’s approach to jewelry is treating each piece as if it were a miniature sculpture. Wendy Grace Jewelry In retrospect, her path to where she is today went full circle as jewelry led her to sculpture, and sculpture led her right back to jewelry. One of our absolute favorites for everyday wear is the Beaded Hoops Earrings for its simplicity and uniqueness. These small silver hoops hang from French ear wires with a cluster of tiny silver beads atop each hoop. They are unassuming but will surely receive compliments. Her talent and creativity awarded her immediate success. Wendy works out of her home studio with the help of a local caster and production staff.

Our Editor’s Picks selected a handful of earrings from her current collections. Wendy Grace Jewelry In the Grace collection, the Pyrite Chain Earrings are a bit of vintage and rock glam welded together and is just the right pair for going out to a concert or bar. A gold-filled chain of double curb links hang vertically with a faceted pyrite nugget and vermeil beads at the end. Miriam Haskell is one of Wendy’s favorite designers because her pieces are so different from what Wendy creates. She “loves its Wendy Grace Jewelry boldness, construction, use of color, and its playfulness and sophistication.” We find that some of those alluring features can be found in Wendy’s own jewelry as she presents pieces that are both bold and playful with colors and metals. The Waterfall Earrings feature miniature gold filled rings with sterling silver snake chains hanging seductively alongside. The golden hue of the rings against the cool, clean strands of silver chains exudes a sexy and sophisticated charm. These can be perfectly paired with the Waterfall Necklace, featuring the same sexy slink of sterling silver snake chains hanging elegantly from a gold-fill chain.

Wendy Grace Jewelry In her Rhapsody collection, the Elisa Earrings are a breathtaking pair of dangling miniature gold-filled hoops cascading downward among grey moonstone, hessonite, smoky quartz, peridot and red aventurine briolettes. These dangle with a flirty sway as they are ethereal and elegant and its feminine color palette pairs well with solids or floral patterns. Just as stunning are the modern and sophisticated Tess Earrings with its graceful gold-filled arc dangling beside a dainty gold chain with a small teardrop chalcedony. The soft opaque hue of light teal is refreshing with the gold metal. Most of Wendy’s ideas are inspired by her materials, from searching out beads possessing “that special something” to laying them out in Wendy Grace Jewelry creating a color scheme, she plays around and uses color in surprising and sophisticated ways. Wendy says, “One piece inspires another, and then another, and before long, there is a new collection.” The Multi Layer Necklace with Stones is also one of our favorites for its ability to look like multiple necklaces as a one piece necklace. Each strand dangles a different semi-precious stone and the combination of amethyst, amazonite, crysacola, and Peruvian opal in various shapes and sizes is stunning. The pastel and light shades of these stones are refreshing and serene.

Her hobbies include music, reading a good book, traveling with her husband, and quality time with friends and family. Her trip to Rome was the most influential because of the incredible ruins throughout the city. Her favorites include the Roman Forum and the Coliseum as she stayed for hours, awestruck by the beauty of the ruins and imagining life during that period. Paris was also extremely inspirational with its beauty of art and architecture, and unconventional fashion scene and life on the Parisian streets. Wendy wants readers to know that “If wearing a piece of my jewelry makes someone smile, feel special, sexy, elegant, or even daring, then it has served the universe well!” Celebrities who are not shy to wear their favorite Wendy Grace pieces include Kirsten Dunst, Cindy Crawford, Rachel Ray, Bridget Fonda, Lauren Velez, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Allison Janney. Moving forward, Wendy plans to expand her retail sales in opening her own shop in Phoenix. Wendy Grace Jewelry is sold in boutiques, specialty stores and galleries nationwide and internationally. Her collection can also be found on retail websites, such as myshape.com and more. Visit wendygracejewelry.com for her most current and complete collection.

www.wendygracejewelry.com

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