If you’ve followed CMD for a while, you’ve probably seen some of our One-of-a-Kind (OOAK) pieces appear over the years. They may look like spontaneous little experiments from the outside, but many of them begin with something much less glamorous: the scraps, offcuts and remnants left behind at our workbenches.

When you make jewelry by hand, there is always material left over. A narrow strip of gold after cutting a ring. A small piece of silver that isn’t large enough for the design it originally came from. Tiny bits and pieces that would be easy to dismiss individually, but when you work with precious metals every day, you learn very quickly that none of it is actually insignificant.

So we keep it. We sort it. We recycle what needs to be recycled, and when a remnant gives us enough to work with, sometimes we turn it into something completely unexpected.

Precious Metal Really Is Precious

I’ve always been mindful of how we use materials at CMD, but the dramatic rise in precious-metal prices over the last few years has made that responsibility impossible to ignore. Gold and silver are valuable resources, both financially and materially, and increasing costs have challenged us to become even more intentional about what happens to every last bit that passes through our studio.

If you’re curious about what has been happening with precious-metal costs and how those changes affect a small jewelry business like ours, I wrote more about it in Precious Metal Prices & What They Mean for Handmade Jewelry.

At our Upstate New York production studio, we collect the offcuts, filings and remnants created during production rather than treating them as waste. Some eventually go back to our precious-metal vendor for recycling, where their value can be put toward new raw material. Others have just enough potential to make us stop and think, Wait... what could we make with this?

When Scraps Become One-of-a-Kind Jewelry

This is where resourcefulness gets really fun. Instead of beginning with a sketch and ordering exactly the materials required to make it, an OOAK design might begin with the material itself. We look at what we already have and let its dimensions, shape or quantity help determine what it wants to become.

Those limitations can lead us somewhere we never would have gone otherwise. An unusual piece of gold might become an unexpected accent. A narrow strip of silver might inspire a different proportion. Leftover materials from several designs might find their way together into something entirely new.

The result is still unmistakably CMD, but with an element of spontaneity that you don’t always get when you're making one of our established designs. No two batches of remnants are exactly alike, which means some of these ideas can only exist once.

Waste Less, Make Something Better

There’s an environmental piece to this, of course. Precious metals require tremendous resources to mine and refine, so using what we already have and recycling what we can is simply a more responsible way to work. But I also think there’s something creatively important about refusing to see remnants as worthless.

Some of my favorite design ideas have come from having to work within a limitation. When you don’t have an endless supply of material in front of you, you start looking at what you do have differently. You experiment more. You problem-solve. You make decisions you might never have made if there were no constraints at all.

That philosophy has become even more meaningful as we’ve expanded our Reconstruction and Jewelry Recycling work. The scale is different, but the idea is related: valuable material doesn’t necessarily stop having a purpose because its first form no longer works for you.

A Different Kind of New

I love making something completely new from fresh sheets and wire, but there is a particular satisfaction in looking at a tiny piece of metal that might have been overlooked and finding another possibility inside it. It’s a reminder that good design isn't always about having more. Sometimes it's about paying closer attention to what is already in front of you.

That’s the spirit behind our One-of-a-Kind work. Some pieces come from remnants, some from experimentation at the bench, and others from ideas we simply need to make once and see where they lead. When they appear, they tend to disappear quickly because once that particular combination of materials is gone, it may truly be gone.

So yes, we’re still getting scrappy. Precious metals may keep us on our toes, but they’ve also pushed us to become more resourceful, more thoughtful and, in some ways, even more creative about what we make.

And around here, no beautiful little piece of metal gets written off too quickly.

Stay scrappy,
Colleen + The CMD Team

© Colleen Mauer Designs. All rights reserved.
Published: April 14, 2025
Updated: August 26, 2026