Mix and Match: The Jewelry of Marcia McDonough

Marcia McDonough. Submitted.

Jewelry maker Marcia McDonough said that Edgewood Orchard Galleries in Fish Creek is the perfect place to sell her creations.

“All of my jewelry comes apart – it’s interchangeable – so you can wear things in different ways,” she said.

That usually requires some explaining about how this interchangeability works and what advantages it provides to a buyer. For McDonough – who had made a career in financial planning at American Express and MetLife – explaining is a polished skill that she has transferred to her jewelry business.

“The consultative relationship is probably most important to me, and Edgewood Orchard is perfect for that,” McDonough said. “About a decade ago, Nell [Jarosh, who owns the galleries with her husband, J.R.] started an appointment book for me, and that really helped. I started to have people make appointments to come in with family heirlooms – brooches, pearls, rings – and they’d want to make their special pieces work with the concept. 

“This is where I learned that the ideas really lend themselves to customization and collaboration. Once a person gets the concept and realizes that he or she can almost self-design their look, it becomes really fun and quite collectible.”

McDonough’s collection at the gallery has 30 or 40 strands of necklaces and 10 different centerpieces, resulting in a choice of at least 300 different combinations just from that inventory. She also designed a coupler for jewels that was tucked out of sight, but it allows an owner to combine jewels and rearrange them at will.

“The earrings work the same way,” she said, “with lots of different ways to hang the angles off of studs.”

The range of choices expands greatly when customers bring in their own treasures. 

“I’m always surprised when someone picks up a centerpiece and combines it with something I’d never think of,” McDonough said. 

After she started making jewelry for herself, women would ask her whether she could make something for them. After she had two sons, 13 months apart, her husband, Tim, suggested she quit her financial-services job and make jewelry full time. 

She started with a design for the tree of life based on a Shel Silverstein story called The Giving Tree.

“I came up with this motif – it looks a lot like the tree of life,” McDonough said. “And I carved it in a piece of marble, and each piece is cast using the lost-wax method. This became very popular, and you can see a lot of people in Door County wearing it.”

Sometimes she mixes rough with polished. She might leave stones in their raw state, for example, and surround them with a bright, highly polished bezel. And she has an eye for the unusual – a bright vintage paper-clip money clip as a pendant, or Wisconsin deer tags as earrings.

To commemorate COVID-19, McDonough has bought a small supply of 2020 quarters honoring the National Park of American Samoa. It depicts a Samoan fruit bat mother hanging in a tree with her pup – a fitting image for the pandemic, she thought.

She pulls out a ring with what appears to be a huge diamond.

“We fabricated a cage with little channels in it, and then the diamonds fit tightly into the channels, and they butt up to each other without metal showing,” McDonough said.

It looks like a five-carat diamond, but because it’s made up of smaller, less expensive stones, it can sell for $6,500, whereas a single five-carat diamond could be about $120,000.

She does something similar with earrings. 

“The baguette is the least-expensive diamond because it’s hard to find a way to use it. So what I did was stagger them, and then there’s a hook so you could wear just a simple little thing, but using the hooks you can make it longer.”

McDonough likes to make her jewelry more affordable – at Edgewood, her works range from approximately $110 to $6,500.

She designs the pieces and then works with a carver to make the mold. And this year, she’s letting the materials play a larger role in her designs.

“For years, I approached jewelry with a vision in my mind and a determination to force that metal to do what I want,” she said. “This year, I’m going to find really pretty things and let them be what they are.”

At a gem show, for instance, McDonough found a small Australian company with a tiny booth where its staff was showing gold nuggets.

“I like them just the way they are, even though they don’t match,” she said.

And she’s doing the same thing with raw amber and bits of lava. Or she goes for a more finished look, such as working with a lapidary in Arizona who carves wolf heads in natural lapis and soapstone – perfect for hanging on a necklace.

McDonough sells through a limited number of galleries and high-end clothing stores “where people are coming in for a bespoke, handmade dress or something like that.”

Now that the two sons who were the catalyst for her career change are out of high school, McDonough and her husband have sold their place in California’s Bay Area and settled on a Door County home for the warm months and an Arizona home during the winter: mixing and matching in both life and art.