Maggie Delnoce has been places, moving across the country a few times before landing for good in Dayton.
And, along the way she’s had a few jobs.
Delnoce said some of those jobs were to pay the bills. But other jobs were in the industry she lives for: jewelry design and metal smithing.
“There's something about jewelry,” she said. “It's an art piece that you carry around with you everywhere. And like especially being a designer, it's kinda like being an architect."
Delnoce is the founder of Olivine & Ivory, the business she runs out of her house in Belmont.
Many jewelry designs available these days are not built to last. She sees her work as a way to do something different.
"You want to design something that lasts, something that you won't have to worry about falling apart later down the line," she said.
The name of her business is a nod to the usually olive-green mineral Olivine. The mineral is in the peridot family of gemstones. Peridots are a common ingredient of the Earth’s composition, but they are the only gemstone to also be found in meteorites.
As for the inclusion of Ivory in the business name, there’s a clue in one of the few jewelry pieces Delnoce is wearing — an elephant carved with a little compass in the center. Delnoce used her skills to rework the piece into a necklace.
“I went to Cambodia for a month and I worked with elephants and I kinda wanted something to represent travel, so I was searching on Etsy and I found this little charm and it's got historical meaning, it's sentimental, it's elephants, it's got a compass for travel. So it's kind of been what I've worn every day since that trip in twenty fifteen. And the elephants are kind of behind my logo as well. If you look at it, the 'O' and the '&' symbol and the 'I' form into an elephant head, which a lot of people don't realize.
Delnoce introduced me to the craft of jewelry making by taking me to a room in her home that serves as her workshop.
On the wall is a large yellow lettered sign that says “ART.” Beneath it is an old desk-of-sorts that I'd described as a pretty cool workbench.
“It's actually an old watchmaker's bench and there's actually carvings in it from multiple times and dates and history that they carved into it," she said. "It says ‘8/27/64 Paul’ which I guess was regarding the Beatles. And then somewhere on here, there's actually the date that Kennedy was shot. They carved it into the bench.”
She finds the ‘11/22/63’ and said, “So I have no idea what this bench has seen, but it's been pretty cool to look up these dates.”
On the desk are the tools of Maggie’s trade: pliers, cutters, soldering tools, and bits of metal.
“Alright, so I prepped this little three legged cat pin yesterday,” she said, showing me a dime-sized piece of metal. “So I cut out the most intricate part because I knew our time here was short and all I have left is the leg here, so I'm gonna saw that out here in a moment and then I'll file it and then we'll solder it together.”
Delnoce files on the tiny 3-legged cat. It’s intricate work.
With the filing not quite finishing, Delnoce fires up the soldering torch and explains the rest of the process she’ll work through.
“All these little bits you see here are pieces of silver solder. There's medium and there's easy and then there's also hard, but I don't really work with that with how tiny the pieces get. And they all have different melting points.”
“Do you ever struggle with pieces that maybe just can't get right or can't get the metal to do what you need it to do?” I ask.
“Oh, 100%,” she told me. “Sometimes I can only get so tiny with where I can file, and so that means I either have to like saw extremely carefully so that way filing can be avoided, or sometimes I have to get a little bit creative or assemble things with wire instead of cutting it out of metal or what have you."
"But thankfully,” she added, “even if I mess it up, it holds its value pretty well, so I can just scrap the gold or scrap the silver and start over. And that tends to happen a lot. If you're not able to deal with failure in jewelry, you are in the wrong business.
It’s clear that Delnoce has a passion for what she does. Recently She stepped away from a full-time job to put all her energy into Jewelry making and design. And with her ‘fur-ever’ friends by her side, she’s using her passion to make Olivine and Ivory a success.
“I just hope that I can do this enough to pay the bills and to make people happy and just put positive energy back into the world. That's really all I can ask for,” she said.
