Salt Of The Earth

Amber Chesebro of Salty Girl Jewelry at work in her Honolulu studio
PHOTOS BY BODIE COLLINS

The sun shines into her Honolulu studio on what is probably one of December’s few truly warm days, and Amber Chesebro is excited. She’s baby-sitting, and she is planning to take the kid and her dog to the beach that afternoon. She also will bring along materials from her studio to make pieces for her company, Salty Girl Jewelry, while she hangs out on the shore.

Channeling nature in Hawaii, Salty Girl Jewelry is comprised of about a dozen collections that include necklaces, rings, earrings and bracelets inspired by marine life, seashells and the ocean. All items are handcrafted.

Chesebro has grown the business substantially since launching in 2010 — and more recently, it’s really begun to take off — and this year, even bigger ventures are on the way.

“(Jewelry making) is a challenge to me,” Chesebro says. “It’s so broad, and there is so much that you can learn, so many different techniques. I just feel like I could be learning my whole life and still not exhaust all of my options.”

Salty Girl products can be found in a number of stores throughout the state, as well as shops in California and Oregon — and she’s got her sights set on Japan. To help with the volume, Chesebro also has hired three jewelry makers and a couple of sales reps.

But all of that success also brings new challenges. Although Salty Girl was born out of a love for nature and inspiration from the Islands, afternoons at the beach, like the one she’s planning today, have become exceedingly rare for Chesebro within the last year or so. Most days are spent inside the studio producing jewelry, or dropping off products to shops, or going to meetings. In the new year, Chesebro is looking to get back to the roots that influenced her to start the company.

For Chesebro, art and nature always have been two constants in her life. Growing up in a fishing town in Maine, she loved exploring the coastline. Her parents both had full-time jobs — her father as a carpenter; her mother as a house cleaner — but are artists on the side. Her mom taught her how to make macrame jewelry, which Chesebro would gift to her friends. Her dad would often set up an easel for her to paint alongside him. Landscapes were her favorite.

“I have always just been drawn to nature in general. And I think, just because I am an artist, I look closely at things and inspect them and just always had a real appreciation for nature and patterns that I find in nature,” Chesebro explains.

The jump to jewelry making was abrupt.

“I remember working one day on (stained glass) pieces, and I just didn’t feel happy about it,” she recalls. “I didn’t feel fulfilled … It was a really weird moment of clarity.”

After attending Rhode Island School of Design’s jewelry and metalsmithing program, she moved to Hawaii and found herself endlessly inspired by the ocean and landscape.

“Within a week, I was just like, ‘This is it. This is my home,'” she recalls.

Entranced by things she found at the beach or on hikes, she launched Salty Girl while working a number of odd jobs to support her passion.

“When I go to the beach, I am always picking up whatever I find is interesting,” Chesebro explains. “I’ll take walks off the beaten path, or go snorkeling, and just check everything out and collect little things.”

These found items will either serve as an idea for jewelry or will be incorporated into the piece itself. She uses found sea glass or sea urchin spines, for example, in some of her pieces. Her limu collection — which includes bracelets, necklaces and rings — looks remarkably like a shiny version of the seaweed.

“I am always observing things that I see out in nature,” she says. “If I think that it is something that would lend itself well to a piece of jewelry — I usually have a sketchbook with me — then I would just sketch it out first.

“And then the end product is I made this really cool bracelet out of seaweed I was inspired by,” she adds. “I think that that is what is so fulfilling about it. That I can take a material that I am inspired by and find a way to make it into a little piece of art.”

Salty Girl certainly has come a long way. It started small; Chesebro would simply stroll into local shops and ask if they’d want to take a look at her jewelry. Nowadays, people approach her — to carry her line in their stores, to construct custom wedding rings, to teach jewelry-making classes.

Scattered throughout her studio are the remnants of a frenetic Christmas season — dozens of tools laid out, metal pieces in progress strewn about and an intimidating to-do list sprawled over two dry-erase boards, each with several different categories.

These are good things, markers of success. But Chesebro knows that it all also must come with a certain degree of balance.

“I want to be able to come up with more new collections more often, so that it doesn’t get stale,” she says. “And I feel that when I take on too much, I spread myself thin and I don’t have time to work on new pieces. And for me, the most fun challenge is taking something I am inspired by and finding a way to translate that into jewelry.”

To do this, Chesebro has been clearing her plate of some of her side work, centering her focus on Salty Girl, to give herself more time to sketch on the beach, more time alone to play with new designs, and more time simply being outside.

The approach is proving beneficial already: This month, Salty Girl will unveil a new line of spiral jewelry, on which Chesebro currently is in the process of putting the final touches. The collection was inspired by a shell that she found while in the Bahamas: “It was this perfect little shell, and I liked both sides of it so much that I made it so that each piece in this collection can be flipped around, so that you can appreciate both the front and the back.”

It’s that type of approach that Chesebro is looking forward to this year.

“My work is largely inspired by nature, so it is really important that I am out there, out seeing and walking around in it, swimming in it.”

For more information and to purchase Salty Girl products, visit saltygirljewelry.com.