What if the side roads led to the jewelry store?

What if the side roads led to the jewelry store?

In my early forties, I was once again confronted with a cataclysm, from which the jewelry store reemerges, more than 20 years later.
The assessment is then imposed on me and, between workshops and interviews, a flash! I am 17 years old, I have to make a choice for my future and my heart is in the balance…
In the tumult of various reflections, one obvious thing stands out: the craft. This choice will require important decisions.

Jewelry, between passion and reason
As a child, I was always captivated by jewelry. Fascinated, I watched my grandmother and my mother open their treasure boxes, discovering their jewelry and those they had inherited. As a teenager, I used to leaf through my book* on master jewelers for hours.
Then came high school and the dreaded choice that I thought would be for life. I was caught between fashion design and jewelry. My vision at the time tipped me in favor of styling.
Contrary to what I thought, by the time I was 40, I had already lived several professional lives, some dictated by the heart, others by reason. There was a fairly logical continuation to my career. If at 17 I didn’t know who I was, didn’t know anything about life and didn’t think about the consequences of my decisions, at 41 it wasn’t the same story. My work contract was ending, I was going to change course. The craft highlighted, a dream of mine as a young girl has
re-emerged: the jewelry store! The question at the time was how to become a craftsman while still being a mom.

A teenage dream, an adult choice
When the opportunity to make a wish come true, I take it! I then listed the jewelry training courses in the vicinity. The conclusion was clear: to follow the professional curriculum to become a jeweler would imply “sacrificing” my life as a mother, which was unthinkable. An alternative was offered to me: continuing education. While I found the right jewelry institute (IBS: Institut de la Bijouterie de Saumur) and the basic training, came the pandemic and the confinement.
More determined than ever, I discovered an online course led by a jeweler. With a great sense of observation and a certain practicality, I firmly believed that this alternative would be a springboard. What reinforced my choice was the experience I gained with my father, whose assistant I was for 10 years. His words, I will never forget:
“think about the goal and rewind to determine all the necessary steps”. That’s what helped me understand why. There are many similarities between dentistry and jewelry. I ordered the basic materials and metal and signed up for the training. In this singular way, I began my apprenticeship.

What if all roads led to the jewelry store?
Jewelry is not improvised. The machine was launched. Tracing, sawing, filing, grinding, drilling, milling, brazing, polishing metal became my daily life as a future jeweler. Step by step, conscientiously, I advanced and felt an immense satisfaction. Insatiable I wanted to learn again and again. A few months later, I chose to follow an introduction to gem-setting given at IBS. I needed to be confronted with the eyes of trainers and graduate students. It was necessary
that I knew if I had real aptitudes and predispositions, or if this project was only utopian.
The result was convincing. I have acquired the basic skills. I could continue to move forward serenely and hope one day to obtain legitimacy. 26 years after an internship in high school, carried out in a passionate jeweler, I found this man, at the doors of the retirement! After all these years, he took me under his wing and made me practice jewelry. I also inherited some of his tools, which I had to be worthy of, because they carried the history of two generations.
Today, it’s finally here! I launched my own jewelry brand. Creations made according to my skills, which will evolve as I learn. I am working on being a jeweler and soon, who knows, a jeweler. History is written day after day. One of my teenage dreams is coming true…

*Book : Maîtres joailliers, directed by A. Kenneth Snowman, Edition Denoël