She got a torch for Christmas, and when her husband, Eric, considers buying her anniversary and birthday gifts, he shops for tools at Garland Welding Supply Company or at Sears. A girl has to work hard to make fine jewelry.
Leah Gormly, however, doesn't wear a tool belt. "I still have a little bit of gentility," says this tall and elegant artist, chuckling over a cup of coffee as she relaxes in their north Dallas home.
Eric smiles. "She's a cross between Tool Time and Sex and the City," he says, to which she gives him a playful nudge.
Leah, a Michigan native and new Dallas resident, created LMG&Co. Jewelry Design. The "Co.," meaning Eric and two cats, is headquartered in their garage and home office. There she makes fine rings, earrings, necklaces, and bracelets (in metals and precious and semiprecious stones) that women can wear with both jeans and evening wear.
In their garage, which isn't air-conditioned, she solders and sweats in the Texas weather. In the house, she arranges three worktables with a jeweler's miniature tools--a small ball-peen hammer, pliers, a mallet, bits, a hand vise, and wax.
Creating in Her Sleep
Leah works first in wax to make the design. "So much of it is play," she says. "You can sit down and try something out and see if it works. If it doesn't, it's just wax and your time." Then she takes the wax master to a local foundry to cast the design. From there, the master goes to a caster in New England. When she completes a fall or spring line, she wraps her works in black cloth and hits the road to wholesale markets where retail representatives around the country buy her designs.
Her creativity never stops, even in the middle of the night. "I dream in textures and shapes," she says, picking up a necklace. "I dreamed this piece. I woke up Saturday morning and sat down, and in about an hour it was done in wax."
Her works look like nature captured in an instant, as if with the click of a camera. A breeze turns a delicate metal leaf pendant. Earrings resemble elongated drops of water, captured just at that moment before the teardrops fall.
She also works in 14- and 18-karat gold, black diamonds, pearls, and sterling silver. The colors of her semiprecious stones resemble a painter's palette--amazonite nearly as bright as turquoise, gray labradorite, lemon citrine, yellow-green peridot, green garnet, and others.
