Collecting images into a mood board has always been how the work begins, not sketching, not planning, but finding. A doorway somewhere beautiful, a plate of food that catches the light exactly right, the inside of a greenhouse, a woman's coat in a crowd. Images that hold a feeling before there is a word for it, gathered until they tell a story together. This is where every collection has started for the past fifteen years.
My cat is black and white, which puts him somewhere in a scientific spectrum debate that I have no interest in. What my eye actually sees is a deep, dark gloss and a light infused glow. My smoothie every morning begins as the rich, piercing blue of the blueberries and shifts to a soft, hazy gray the moment I add honey and yogurt. The bird's nest in the tree across the street is built from twigs and one random strand of orange thread woven into it, and the orange is what I notice first. The hues register in my brain before the actual objects do. This is not something I developed. It is simply how I see.
A scene from the movie The Devil Wears Prada has stayed with me since I first watched it. Miranda explains to Andrea that the blue sweater she had grabbed off a sale rack was not really a free choice at all. Color had been moving through fashion, through culture, through the market for years, and it arrived on Andrea's body as something she believed she had selected herself. She had no idea how far back the story started. That scene is about more than fashion. It is about how colors impact us before we can grapple with the emotions they create.
The Color Mood Book came out of that way of seeing. About two years ago, I took what had always been private, the image collecting, the mood building, the way feeling accumulates before a single design decision is made, and put it on a page. Five color stories, each built from a different emotional world, each a different way of understanding what you are drawn to and why. And then almost immediately I thought: but will anyone understand why this matters? That question carried enough weight to make me set it aside.
Not long ago a consultation took an unexpected turn. The woman who booked it wasn't really looking for gemstone jewelry. She wanted to be like what she'd seen in magazines, and gemstones didn't feel trendy enough to get her there. But we started talking about color, and by the end of the call she knew she loved emeralds. She didn't give me the work. But she came back later for a pair of emerald earrings from my ready to wear collection, and that was worth more to me than the original commission. It made me think seriously about how to help women visualize themselves in gemstone jewelry before they ever sit down with me. The Color Mood Book was already sitting there waiting to do exactly that.
This collection of color stories exists because the emotional relationship between a person and color is real and specific and almost always underestimated. Every board in the book started as a feeling I was chasing, a mood, a memory, a particular texture of experience, before it became anything visual. The image collecting was always in pursuit of that feeling. What builds from that process is a vision, and the themes in this book are an invitation to recognize something about yourself that may have been working quietly in the background for a long time.
The women I make jewelry for are ready to stop guessing at what their own instincts are telling them. The Color Mood Book is available now, a place to begin finding the color story that is actually yours.
And if you want to take that further, the Private Color and Jewelry Styling Experience is one hour built around understanding your color story at a level The Color Mood Book cannot reach, and finding the jewelry that belongs to you.