In a small studio in her South Sound home, Rachel Christ spreads her materials out before her and waits for inspiration to strike. And when it does, she cuts, heats, bends, hammers and decorates sheet silver, gemstones and pearls into one-of-a-kind pieces of jewellery.
Selling her work mainly to Silver Rain Retail at The Ritz-Carlton, Grand Cayman, Rachel has an enviably flexible schedule, fitting her jewellery design in with her other day jobs and travelling to distant shores each year.
Every hurricane season she travels to southeast Asia on buying trips, where she visits markets and meets with gem dealers to buy the stones and pearls with which she will return to Cayman to work on her new collections.
“Some designers order their gemstones online, or they’ll go to trade fairs, but I like to see everything. When you order online you don’t know what you are going to get.”
Rachel personally inspects each and every stone she buys, something she knows sets her work aside from the mainstream, and a fact her loyal customers appreciate.
The whole package sounds in many ways like a lifestyle most could only dream of: the ability to pursue a passion and spend one’s days creating beautiful things, being one’s own boss and having no set timetable, visiting exotic destinations and knowing one’s designs are being worn by women around the world – but it wasn’t even a dream Rachel set out to turn into a reality.
“It was a bunch of little incidents that all just sort of happened,” she says. “It was an evolution of events that took me in that direction.”
How it all started
The seeds were sown years back when she used to travel from Cayman to Central America and would see jewellery makers selling their goods by the side of the road. One year, she took some gems to Guatemala and had someone there make them into what she wanted.
“Then I started to think, ‘I could do that myself’,” says Rachel. “Then a friend said he was going to Bangkok for three months and asked if I wanted to go join him. I jumped at the chance…Then I found this jewellery making school in Chiang Mai.”
It was a poor school, she says, and the tools they learned with were rudimentary, but she learned the techniques and returned for a second course to hone her skills.
Just two years later The Ritz Carlton was selling her work – an impressive achievement in such a short space of time. But Rachel takes it all in her stride. “It’s definitely not easy,” she says, “but it’s really not that hard, either.”
The hardest part of the creative process, she finds, is not the discipline needed to sit down and create, but the strength to cope with the criticism that goes hand in hand with anything creative. When displaying her work at shows, she says it can be hard when people openly voice their opinions on her work when she is clearly present.
“People don’t realise how hard it is to put what you have made out there for everyone to judge and comment on,” she says. That said, Rachel has developed a unique style – sometimes bold, sometimes delicate – and she is sticking to it. If people ask her to make something with a little stingray or turtle on it, she simply says ‘no’.
She is not going to change what she does or how she does it because of what others may say. “I make what I make. If you like it – marvellous. If you don’t,” she shrugs, “sorry!”.
As with any new venture, mistakes are made and one learns along the way. Rachel has learned the hard way to tell the fake gems from the genuine ones, and has suffered her fair share of burns and bangs in the process of making her jewellery. But this is all part of the journey.
Where the journey will end is not certain, but for Rachel the ultimate goal is not to occupy display space between David Yurman and Mikimoto. The most important thing is to enjoy what she is doing.
“I don’t want to get to the point that it’s not fun any more. I just want to have a good time – make my designs and see what happens.”
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