Jewels of the beach

When Andrea Cole of Port Washington goes to the beach, she isn’t looking for a suntan or a swim. She’s just looking for her next art project.

Cole is a metalsmith and enamelist who creates jewelry beach glass and stones.

“I find something cool that I like, and I keep it and I make something with it,” she said.

The retired electrical engineer loves the procedure as much as the finished products.

“The technical part of my brain likes the process. Then coming up with a really cool wearable piece of art is fun,” she said.

It’s not an easy task and can be dangerous. Cole works in her garage, using a soldering torch that she learned makes a pop when it turns off, and she uses a kiln that reaches 1,550 degrees.

“I’m super careful,” she said. I’m comfortable with it after all these years, but I still respect it.”

Cole grew up in White Lake Township, Mich., an hour’s drive from Detroit. She and her two sisters grew up digging for rocks near the water, and their father was a rock collector.

“I always collected stones so I’ve got boxes of stones everywhere,” she said. “That’s how it started and that’s how it still is. I’ve always got my eye to the ground looking for treasures.”

Her family had a bound book with brightly colored rocks and minerals and their descriptions.

Cole was inspired when reading about a woman on the East Coast who made jewelry with sea glass, and she began researching metalsmithing.

“I thought this is definitely what I want to do for a hobby,” she said.

She bought a torch and setting tank before she started making jewelry, knowing someday she would take up the activity.

Cole earned an electrical engineering degree from Michigan Technological University in 1990. She worked for Plexus Corp. in Neenah for five years before Rockwell Automation — starting when it was Allen-Bradley — for the next 26 years. She was an engineer and manager at the Mequon location and traveled to nearby cities after work to see where she wanted to live.

“I fell in love with Port,” she said.

Cole’s home isn’t far from south beach, an ideal area to find gems she turns into jewelry.

She gets help from a friend, a onetime fellow board member for the Port Washington Historical Society. Mark Koenig takes walks along the north beach and leaves bags of stones on Cole’s porch. Cole thanked him by making his wife a couple of pendents and making a piece of pottery for the couple.

Cole took a jewelry-making class at Milwaukee Area Technical College. One of the teachers, Terri McCarthy, started her own studio in Grafton, where artists come to learn and share expertise on metal fabricating and jewelry. Cole attends regularly, has taken five weekend workshops at the studio and has been connected with other educational opportunities through McCarthy.

“Everybody’s there with the right idea to help others,” Cole said.

Last year, she took a stone-setting class in at New Approach School for Jewelers in Tennessee, where Cole said the famous jewelry company Tiffany sends its jewelry makers. Students used cubic zirconia and brass rings to learn how to do diamond settings.

She bought a microscope and stone-setting equipment, and added that to her repertoire.

Cole spent two weeks in Tuscany at an intense enameling workshop. Before class started each day, she found rocks from construction waste that she made into jewelry.

She snugly wraps a bezel wire around a stone or piece of glass before cutting off any overlap, then files the edges flat. She removes the stone and solders the wire, “building a home for the stone.”

Cole then puts the wire in a pickle compound to eliminate the oxidation from the acetylene torch, and cuts around the piece with a jeweler’s saw, “constantly fiddling to make sure it fits,” she said.

She uses a bezel pusher in a rocking motion to push against the stone so it barely slides over the edge and to keep it in place.

Then she figures out the back. For a necklace, she holds the piece with a tweezers to add a bail, the rounded part with a hole that the chain to slides through.

Her bezel wires are usually made of silver or copper, and within the last year Cole started using recycled gold from twisted or broken pieces that can’t be repaired.

“It’s fun because when you melt gold it kind of balls up on itself,” she said.

Cole puts the gold through a rolling mill over and over until it’s thin enough.

“The process of metalsmithing and enameling is really intensive,” she said.

Cole has her process down to about three hours to create a piece.

“In the beginning it would take twice that,” she said.

Cole remembers that her first piece was an ocean jasper she sold at an art show.

Cole uses her microscope to find imperfections in pieces. She has used a rock tumbler for years to smooth stones before making them into jewelry.

The process partly employs the enjoyment from her career of problem solving.

“This is that plus creativity making something I love,” she said. “The process itself is very interesting. I like it when it all works.”

Cole was recently accepted ArtServancy program through Gallery 224 in Port and the Ozaukee Washington Land Trust. She is creating art pieces for the Cedarburg Environmental Study Area.

She is trying a new technique with pieces to be unveiled next spring. Cole takes photos at the preserve and uses a black-and-white printer to print them on water slide decal paper.

She coats the back of copper pieces with white, blue or sometimes yellow enamel, then sticks the paper decals to the metal and places them in her kiln.

Her printer’s toner has the right amount of iron oxide that allows the clear portion of the photo to burn off while the image embeds into the metal.

The pieces are being turned into various pieces of jewelry that will be for sale in March or April of 2024.

“Anything I can do with a stone I can do with an enamel piece,” Cole said.

She sells some of her jewelry at DreamPort Market in downtown Port and volunteers at the historical society’s 1860 Light Station.

“I failed at retirement,” she said with a laugh.

For more information, visit Cole’s Instagram page at www.instagram.com/andreacole_artjewelry.