Don’t Call it ‘Frisco: Meagan Reelitz’s Prize-Winning Ring

Diamonds Are in the Cracks Ring by Meagan Reelitz

Oakland jewelry designer Meagan Reelitz

Finding beauty in life’s rough spots never fails to impress. And so much the better if that beauty happens to involve diamonds and San Francisco. That’s just what you’ll find sparkling away in Oakland designer Meagan Reelitz‘s Diamonds Are in the Cracks ring, the grand prize winner in the Jewelry Artisan’s Collective 2011 Design Challenge. The most recent installment of the annual jewelry challenge asked designers to create work inspired by the San Francisco experience and the theme, “Don’t Call it ‘Frisco.”

Using earthquakes as her starting point (and that’s about as real-deal San Francisco as it gets), Reelitz created a piece with both style and historical substance.

“I took the seismographic report from the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake and altered it to fit nicely on a ring band of sterling silver. I then hand-sawed the report into the band. I set 5 diamonds within the cracks,” Reelitz says of her process.

Stay tuned for news of Reelitz’s upcoming exhibition at Maiden Lane’s Manika Jewelry.

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Shacking Up: Rare Device + Little Otsu = Cool, New Space

News from San Francisco’s only design store with a name torn from the pages of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan: Rare Device is leaving Market Street for a bigger and better space on Divisadero, where it will partner up with onetime Mission paper goods shop Little Otsu. The planned relocation is set to take place in early March.

Specializing in design-conscious gifts, home accessories, art objects, jewelry and wearables, the new collaborative shop will include a Little Otsu mini store stocked with a full line of publishing products, as well as selected crafts and goods. This is the first time Portland-based, Little Otsu will be available in San Francisco since the closure of their Valencia Street store over a year ago.

Rare Device is currently located on 1845 Market Street and promotes a variety of designers who create modern, handmade, and beautifully-designed goods. We can’t wait to see the new and improved space in the Western Addition neighborhood at 600 Divisidero Street (at Hayes).

Photography courtesy of Rare Device

Blogger Fashion Project: 365 Ways to Wear Crochet

San Francisco blogger Kathryn Vercillo (a.k.a. @CrochetBlogger) has just launched a 365 project for 2012. In 365 Ways to Wear Crochet, she’ll be showing off different ways to wear crochet and pairing it with both casual and dressy outfits that she really wears each day. Below, her first outfit – which features the first shrug she ever crocheted.

Learn more about this 365 fashion project here.

The Outfit: Blue crochet shrug, black turtleneck sweater, fringed denim skirt, black patterned fishnet-style tights

Crochet Detail: Blue acrylic crochet shrug (the first shrug she ever made)

The shoes: black flats

This post originally appeared on Crochet Concupiscence.

A Novel Idea: Braeden Glass Jewelry

The plot: a queer-identified transgender man from Oakland wants to spread awareness, write a novel and pay for surgery, roughly in that order. To advance this page-turner of a tale, he launches a jewelry company named after a key character in the novel. It may sound like fiction, but that’s essentially the story behind just-launched jewelry line Braeden Glass by designer Ayden Oliver Alberry.

The jewelry line is the real-life company of a fictitious character in Oliver’s in-progress novel, and there’s an etsy shop, a web site and a Kickstarter campaign that go along with it. If the Kickstarter goal of $500 is reached by late next week, Alberry will use the funds to expand the line.

But beyond the backstory, the reason to scan the line’s moody, bohomenian-chic necklaces and bracelets is based purely on looks. Wood, mixed metal charms, pyrite beads, crystals and leather mingle on multi-strand wrist-wrappers that would fit right in during your next arm party.

And that certainly makes for a happy ending.

More San Francisco jewelry designers

Snap Judgment: Friedasophie’s Delicate Double Finger Ring

Our very-visual, (almost) chatter-free snap judgment of the day: an alternative to the usually-bulky look of two-finger rings awaits in the Delicate Silver Double Finger Ring, $45, made of two one-millimeter silver bands soldered together and hand-hammered by San Francisco jewelry label Friedasophie.

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