Artists

Phil Aleci
and
Carla Harmon

Well where to start?

How it all began is rather a funny story of sorts. Carla has always been a rock loving person collecting rocks, Sea shells, and beach stones ect… any chance she got. One day someone on the beach asked her “What are you going to with those beach stones?” Carla replied “I’m going to make jewelry with them” and with that the lady on the beach just laughed and kept walking. Well one day not too long after that in the newspaper Carla saw an article on a Rock and Mineral club that had Lapidary and Silver Smith workshops available for members and decided she was going to go. She had planned on bringing one of her girlfriends that was also interested in jewelry making but she was unable to go the day of the class and that’s where I come in. Not wanting to make her go alone I said “I’ll go with you”. Well the rest is history; Ok maybe not history just yet but maybe someday.

(September. 2007)
So off we went to the club, the first week we took a two hour Lapidary Workshop and the following week a three hour Silver Smith workshop. Before these two classes we had never polished a rock or worked with silver at all. Because the Club was 1-1/2 hours from the house that was the last of our official training and the rest since has been trial and error.

(February 2008)
Steel and Stone Designs is “born”
At the time all we had was one torch, a make shift rock polisher, an old tile saw to cut rock slabs with and not much else. Little by little we added to our tools and 11 months later we had two cabbing machines, four rock saws, a Setting and design bench with two complete torch set ups and a much better selection of necessary silver smithing tools.

We cut 95% of all the Cabochons we use in our designs and create all of our settings from scratch. No two Pendants, Rings, Bracelets or Earrings will ever be the same, all of them are truly one of a kind. We take a lot of pride in our work and get great pleasure from seeing customers try on a piece of our jewelry and fall in love with it.

We both want to thank everyone that has made this venture a happy, successful, and most of all fun experience.