About

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Ginny

As a child, I fell in love with fixing and tinkering – hammering, and sanding, molding and shaping, and inventing on the family farm. Nothing escaped my curiosity. The dusty and muddy earth, depending on the weather, was as much a part of me as my own skin. I loved everything tactile. This was to shape me into who I am today.

On the farm, my parents taught me to be resourceful. For example, if you needed a tool, you made it or fixed it. If you wanted to eat well, you raised your own food. I was born in Chicago to very hard working Italian parents and raised on a vegetable farm in rural Illinois. The farm defined our family life but in school, my love of the arts and an appreciation of the human creative instinct inspired me to pursue a career as an art teacher.

In 1984, I spent the summer in the south of France and made the life changing decision to stop making pottery. When I returned to Boston I took a job in a woodworking studio making cabinets and custom furniture. This turned out to be great preparation for the work I would be doing as a jeweler. I learned to read layout and blueprints, and precision measurements, and the use of numerous hand and power tools. After work hours, I stayed in the studio and made furniture and other wood objects for my home. I was fascinated with making small wooden jewelry components for use in making necklaces and earrings.

This piqued my memory of an old love for metalsmithing that began in college. I was off and running, discovering Swarovski crystal, semi-precious and precious stones, and developing several lines of jewelry. It was 1989 and Ginny Remedi Designs was born. The name, Jewels for the Journey, came a few years later, but the journey and the jewels have always been there with me. The name only helped me to notice that my life has been so full of jewels in the form of people, events and gifts.