CREATIVE DESIGN: Bring in YOUR idea...WE can make it happen!!

Poway Fine Jewelers Owner Tim Dooley is a creative genius when it comes to designing and custom-making unique jewelry. His passion is telling stories with jewelry, and he wants to help you tell yours. 

Do you have your grandmother’s heirloom piece that is too old and worn to wear? Or your great aunt’s pendant that is out of style but contains a beautiful gem in the center? Bring it to us. And with it, bring an idea. Tim has the ability to make something you love with all your heart.  Of course, making anything less than exactly what you want and love is not an option. So Tim needs your help.

First, let’s paint a picture. Of what? We don’t know. Anything? Let’s hire an artist and tell him to paint a picture for us. “What would you like me to paint?” he might ask. He gets no input from us.  So what’s the best way to get the painting you want? Have a meeting with the artist so you can tell him what kind of painting you might want to grace your walls with. How big or small is the place for the new painting, how much light is available, what are the colors in the room, furnishings, window treatments, floors, walls, and on and on?  Family portrait, summer cabin? Landscape (what season), waterscape, etc.? The best approach is a checklist that helps make those decisions.  Because you will be looking at it every day.  Your jewelry is no different and deserves the same planning and decisions. 

If you have grandma or great aunt’s piece of jewelry that you want fixed or changed, the best way to approach Tim is to start with an idea. You don’t need to know EXACTLY what you want. But a good starting place is: earrings, pendant, bracelet, ring? Then: style,  single stones, rows of stones or diamonds, add one colored gem to each earring along with some sentimental diamonds? Maybe  birthstones? Tim and staff will guide you, however long it takes, with an invaluable, extensive knowledge-based approach and an intuitive interview style that is hard to match. You will have jewelry you are thrilled with when you’re finished!

Again, Tim strongly believes that jewelry tells stories. Who better to tell it than you? Who better to discuss what visually makes you happy before hiring an artist to paint you a picture? You. Who’s going to live in the house you design? Not your home designer. You. 

It all starts with you. Tim says that the younger generation of people tends to come in with bookmarked websites of all their favorite jewelry pieces, designs, shapes, and styles. The older generation tends to view Tim as their painter or their architect. He is neither. He is a master craftsman, he can make anything, and he loves the process of design, but he is not a mind-reader or knower of all things. He doesn’t know that, when you plop those 12 diamonds and two sapphires on the counter, whether or not you want to keep them in their current form with some subtle improvements and major repairs, or if you’d like to turn them into a set of earrings and a pendant.

 

So please, before coming in with heirlooms or loose stones, or those once-special pieces that no longer contain sentiment, look through magazines and spend some time on Google (click images) and drop or add a word like:  flowing, geometric, partial bezel, pave, channel set, halo, gallery, and on and on…. to figure out at least a general idea of what you want this piece or pieces to look like. When you have looked at a few dozen pieces from commercial stamped out things to award-winning custom pieces, you will be more in-tune and able to know your “personal style” when you see it.  Become your own painter and architect, and Tim and company will take care of the rest.