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Everything is a little more beautiful when it's made with heart and made by hand.
There is so much we can buy with a few taps on a screen these days, and there are plenty of things I'm very happy to have show up on my doorstep almost immediately. Jewelry has always felt different to me. When you're choosing something you'll wear against your skin, possibly every day for years, I think there's value in knowing how it was made and whose hands were behind it.
Here at CMD, there are real human hands involved throughout the process. Metal is cut, soldered, filed, sanded, shaped, polished, checked, adjusted and polished again. We use tools and certain prefabricated components where they make sense, of course, but the work itself requires an enormous amount of skill, judgment and attention from the people at the bench.
Sometimes we'll spend an hour making a tiny improvement that most people would probably never notice. We notice it, though, and that's enough reason to do it. That's one of the things I've always loved about making jewelry this way. There isn't a button we press and a finished CMD piece pops out the other side.
Making jewelry by hand takes time because there are so many individual steps between an idea and the finished piece. Even designs we've made hundreds of times still pass through the hands of our production team, and every piece needs to be considered on its own. Metal behaves like metal. Stones have their own personalities. Sometimes something needs another adjustment, another polish or another set of eyes before we're happy with it.
We've gotten very good at what we do over the years, but being efficient has never meant rushing. I'd rather take the extra time to get something right than send a piece out into the world knowing we could have done better.
One of my favorite things to share these days is what's actually happening around the jewelry bench. It isn't always glamorous. Sometimes it's sawing. Sometimes it's soldering. Sometimes it's someone staring VERY closely at something tiny for much longer than you'd imagine. But that's where the jewelry becomes what it is.
There's a human connection to handmade objects that I've always found difficult to put into words. When you hold something another person made, you're holding the result of their time, experience and attention. No two pieces or projects are ever completely identical because no two days at the bench are completely identical either.
For me, this has never only been about the physical process. It's also about making things with intention. We choose materials we believe in, work with suppliers we trust and think carefully about how a piece will feel and function long after it leaves us. I want CMD jewelry to be worn, lived in, loved, repaired when necessary and, in many cases, passed along or transformed into something new years from now.
That philosophy has become an even bigger part of CMD as our Custom and Reconstruction work has grown. There is something incredibly satisfying about taking meaningful materials, or starting completely from scratch, and creating a piece specifically for the person who will wear it. It reminds me why I fell in love with making jewelry in the first place.
A lot has changed since I started CMD, and a lot has changed since I first wrote this post in 2019. We've grown, moved across the country, changed the way we work and learned an unbelievable amount along the way. What hasn't changed is how much I care about the object that eventually lands in your hands.
I know handmade jewelry takes longer. I know it isn't the least expensive way to make something. But I also know what it feels like to wear a piece that has become part of your life, and I think those pieces deserve to be made with care.
That's still what we're doing over here, one tiny piece of metal at a time.
With two hands and a whole lotta heart,
Colleen
© Colleen Mauer Designs. All rights reserved.
Published: February 28, 2019
Updated: August 14, 2026
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