A Stone’s Throw

From selling on TV shopping channels to teaching budding silversmiths, Eileen Ott continues to enjoy a four-decade run working with precious metals and gemstones.

Picture this: it’s a “vegging on the couch for hours” kind of day in the ‘90s. Channel surfing brings you to the reruns of “Star Trek” and “Seinfeld” you’ve seen fifty times before you somehow land on one of the many (many) home shopping channels high on the roster. It’s there that Eileen Ott and her husband Dennis started their long careers in gems and jewelry, eventually coming to operate Albuquerque Silver and Stone Academy, a successful jewelry-making studio in the city.

Their actual journey began in the 1980s, when Eileen got a summer job at a place that specialized in jewelry findings (bits and bobs that help join jewelry pieces to complete them). A friend of that place’s owner just so happened to be Eileen’s future husband, and soon enough they were off on their own on the wholesale side of jewelry manufacturing. From there it was a natural transition to gems, and the two operated under the name Gem Quest. Shopping networks were only one side of it, the other being upwards of 20 gem shows a year across the country. Nearly a decade later, a combination of burnout and fluctuating prices of their materials influenced the Otts to hang up their jew- elers’ hats and sell the business.

Eileen, however, motivator to the max, wasn’t about to let her husband get away with endless lazy days. “We thought we were going to retire, and we did for about 8-10 years. We weren’t doing this anymore but I didn’t want my husband sitting on the couch doing nothing and dying in five years!” says Ott. “I told him to go do something just to get out of the house, so he would go down to a senior center because they had lapidary, which is stone cutting, and he went down there to use the equipment.” Other senior center attendees soon began to take notice, and after months of going back and forth to and from different senior centers across the city, Eileen was convinced to open up a shop of her own. That was in 2011, and Albuquerque Silver and Stone Academy continues to thrive twelve years on.

“I kind of resisted it at first because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go back into the business, but then we started meeting all of these wonderful people at the senior centers,” says Ott. “It turned out to be the best thing I ever did because it’s so much fun, doing what we’re doing now.” Eileen and her husband are a jewelry dream team—on the stone side is Dennis, who teaches students how to cut and polish the main attraction in their jewelry, while Eileen is all about technique in making rings, bracelets, necklaces…the list goes on.

With six classes four days a week, Eileen just might be busier than she was at the height of Gem Quest. Still, that hasn’t hindered her love of teaching or the craft of jewelry making. Plus, the Otts still participate in the ABQ Gem and Mineral Show twice a year to showcase their students’ work. “I’ve even got several students now who’ve got their jewelry in various galleries; several of my girls show their stuff in Placitas, and others who sell by word of mouth,” says Ott.

Of course, Ott says that an extra hand or two wouldn’t hurt, and has considered bringing on some of her more experienced students as instructors to make her classes, which have had a steadfast waitlist for months, a little bit bigger.

Starting off might sound intimidating, but according to Eileen, there isn’t much that can’t be taught. “In my beginning classes I kind of teach what’s possible in silversmithing, meaning I take them through step by step how to cut, polish, file, solder, and then a little bit of how to create a finished project,” says Ott. “Hopefully what I want to teach them in the first class is what’s possible in silversmithing.” Intermediate classes dive into what Ei- leen says most of her students are there to learn: putting a bezel around a stone. “What most people want to do is buy a stone and make jewelry based on the stones they’ve bought.”

While the business is stronger than ever, the pandemic slowed things down quite a bit. The lull prompted Eileen to consider producing silversmithing videos that could be accessed through a tiered pay system similar to Patreon. This idea is still in its infancy, but Eileen is hopeful that the videos could provide her services to a wider audience.

Albuquerque Silver and Stone got their start as a senior-center-hopping silversmithing circus of sorts, but their base demographic is a variety of young and old men and women. “It’s interesting to me to see the age range of people who want to take classes,” says Ott. “My oldest student was 93, and then I’ve had people as young as 14 in class.” For both men and women, their motivations vary too: some take classes as a hobby or to give away their pieces, and some take classes with the intention of starting a business and making silversmithing their career.

If you have any interest, you might as well give it a shot—even people with no experience whatsoever find that just like any other skill, silversmithing is all about practice. And unlike every other skill, you’ll walk away with a gorgeous, one-ofa-kind piece that screams ‘you.’

“For me, that’s the most exciting thing, to see people bring in their stones and their designs and we sit down and figure out a way to make what they want to make,” says Ott. “The look in their eyes when they don’t expect something to come out great and it does? Indescribable.”

EMMA TREVINO

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