Be unique: Wear hand-made jewelry

Just because you can’t afford high-end jewelry from a name designer doesn’t mean that you are doomed to wear the same nice but boringly mass-produced jewelry that all your friends and co-workers are sporting. Local artists are busy creating affordable, one-of-a-kind jewelry pieces that can provide a distinctive pop to any outfit.

Hint: A distinctive pop is your style if shiny gold, lab-created gems, and crustings of tiny diamond chips make you shudder and cringe. Or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, if cheap plastic-y knockoffs of ethnic jewelry send you into a hyperventilating spasm.

Of course, the prices of even small designers can zoom into what amounts to the financial stratosphere with heavy gold and bejeweled pieces. But typically, you will be able to find hand-made, high-quality earrings, pendants, and bracelets if you are willing to spend $15 to $200.

What can you get? Paper, recycled plastic, and glass beads; earthy copper wire and wood; fused dichroic glass with its otherworldly metallic iridescence; “garden-variety” fused glass in rich brights like peacock blue and sunflower gold; a rainbow of semiprecious stones such as topaz, chalcedony, citrine, quartz, carnelian, jade, onyx, moonstone, sodalite, amethyst, tiger eye, turquoise, coral, and agate, to name a few; and PMC (precious metal clay) silver jewelry, a metallic clay that is worked and fired to leave behind almost pure silver masterpieces of wearable art.

More and more, these artists are banding together in cities and mid-sized towns nationwide to hold regular craft fairs and artist markets so that average people can stroll the stalls, meet the artists, and find a treasure or two. Howard Street Homemade and the Lexington Avenue Bizarre Bazaar are two such markets in Asheville.

Another option is a full-fledged art gallery. These days, even many small towns boast an art gallery with a strong jewelry presence, like tiny Tallulah Falls, GA, and its Georgia Heritage Center for the Arts (day trip from Atlanta). However, if local avenues fail you, go to the Internet and search out purveyors of all things hand-made, such as the now-classic Etsy, which recently had more than 1 million pieces of hand-made jewelry available at its on-line gallery.

So please don’t waste your time and your style points shopping for jewelry at the big-box stores!