DESIGNER TUNES INTO STONES’ ENERGY
Julie Tuton: 73 Throckmorton Ave., Mill Valley; (415) 871-4236. www.julietuton.com.
“You’d look good in this,” says Julie Tuton as she picks up a delicate, long Y necklace consisting of a chain of gold-dipped pyrite with a ruby at the center station. A gold cross dangles from the ruby. Tuton secures the necklace around my neck.
The reporter peers into the mirror. Tuton peers into the mirror.
“I know when someone feels a piece is right for them,” says Tuton, who is also an energy therapist. “I feel all tingly.” “I’m not feeling it,” I say. “I’m not feeling tingly,” she says.
The red-headed jewelry designer pulls out a 26-inch gold chain interspersed with small, clear Swarovski crystals, and another mixed with gray pearls and chalcedony. She places both around my neck. “Now, those,” she says, with satisfaction, “work.”
They do. Layered together, they look and feel great.
We are in Tuton’s jewelry store in quaint downtown Mill Valley. The interior feels seductive, with gold and crystal chandeliers and rococostyle cabinets. Tuton, 52, who moved to the Bay Area from Boston in 1987, makes her casually elegant jewelry in a small office behind a curtain.
The store is hung with her colorful paintings of flowers. “Art,” says Tuton, who earned a degree in psychology and fine art from Brandeis University, “is a way of creating happiness.” And that includes the art of jewelry making.
Many women would be happy to own a piece of Tuton’s collection, which mostly ranges in price from $28 to $395. Although she has staples like her “bubble” designs — made of small, sparkly, interlocking gold vermeil and sterling circles — much of what she creates
is one-of-a-kind. These include her diamond “caviar sticks” — micro, faceted diamonds in a pin shape ($495), which she masterfully surrounds with metal that she hand shapes to make them look as if they are bevel set.
“The way I wrap the sticks creates a lightness,” Tuton says. “The stones have more presence. There’s less metal and the stones can rest on your skin and you can pick up their energy.” Tuton also makes what she calls diamond “spikes,” slim darts of diamonds set in oxidized silver or rose gold vermeil. She calls the large version the “cut the bull—” spike.
“I wear these on a day I’m not going to hold my tongue,” she says dryly.
Her designs, though, speak for themselves. Dainty, double-teardrop “caviar” earrings in 14 karat gold fill and filled at the top with tiny, glittering pyrite, garnets or apatite, are so delectable you will want a pair of each.
Tuton says she knows what suits her clients. “Some customers, what catches their eye works for them,” she says. “Others have no idea. I sense what the piece feels like for them.”
Tuton has been designing jewelry for 30 years. But she
credits energy therapy for unleashing her creative inspiration. Sitting down at her desk she picks up several small rose quartz teardops, and beads in labradorite and gold to make her signature chandelier earrings. She lays them out in a reverse triangle and starts the intricate process of wirewrapping each one so they can drop in three tiers from a gold wire, or each other.
“I have a strong intuitive sense,” says Tuton, who is a facilitator with the controversial movement Access Consciousness. “But classes strengthened my ability to perceive the different energies in gemstones, so that when I arranged them together in different combinations, they would create a unique vibration. When someone is drawn to one of my pieces, it assists them in unspoken ways — to feel relaxed, beautiful, nurtured. The other day a customer said, ‘Your jewelry makes me happy!’ I’m realizing that was always my target in life. To create things that would make people happy.”
And jewelry does that. “I always wear jewelry, even when I’m going on a hike,” Tuton says. “The gold and the stones have an energy. If you’re not feeling good, I say, get dressed, apply makeup and put on a necklace. It really works.”