About
Taos Jewelry
Hi, I’m Timothy Smith, the creator behind Taos Jewelry. My connection to jewelry and stonework started long before I ever thought of making it a venture.
I grew up watching my dad make jewelry. When I was a young teenager, he showed me how to cut stones, or lapidary. I watched him stamp silver, solder silver and gold, and form jewelry by hand. It fascinated me that he could take a bunch of old dimes and turn them into a hatband, or start with a raw stone and turn it into a jewel and then a finished piece of jewelry.
Sometimes I would go with him when he sold his work. He had several galleries he regularly worked with, but sometimes he would simply take a box of jewelry into a new gallery and somehow talk them into buying most of it. Looking back, I understand why. He’s a great contemporary Southwestern jewelry maker.
“One of my favorite things is still being the first person to cut into a stone and see what is inside. Sometimes that stone has been waiting millions of years for someone to open it up.”
Jewelry and stonework also run through both sides of my family. After my mom’s dad retired from careers in construction and gardening, he took up silversmithing, and I still have some of his old tools. My dad’s brother also learned lapidary and silversmithing and left behind a large collection of cut and uncut stones, silver, and jewelry.
For a long time, though, I didn’t continue making jewelry myself. That changed in 2018, when I took a jewelry class in college as an elective. I took to it like a duck to water, and once I started using the lapidary equipment, I was completely hooked. Working with stones can feel like medicine or meditation for me. Sometimes I lose track of time and even forget to eat for hours.
I went around and around trying to come up with a name. Every time I had an idea, I would check whether the website was available. Somehow, TaosJewelry.com was.
That felt like another one of the small miracles that helped push this adventure forward. I registered the name with the state, got a business license, and in 2023 my hobby officially became a business.
Since then, Taos Jewelry has gone through a few different versions. During 2024 and 2025, I sold at pop-ups in Taos almost every weekend for about six months. I sold quite a bit, met a lot of people, and had a great time doing it. Then life moved in another direction for a while. I started working on houses and rental properties, got involved with hot air ballooning, and spent more than a year hardly making or selling jewelry at all.
Now I’m ready to come back to it and to the part of the work that has always fascinated me most.
I believe stones have their own energy, frequencies, and ideas about what they want to become. Some immediately look like a ring or pendant, while others make an obvious pair of earrings. Sometimes two stones that seem like they should go together absolutely refuse. Being able to work with something that came from the earth and turn it into functional, wearable art is still amazing to me.
The cultures, changing seasons, mountains, rivers, plains, plateaus, animals, and landscape of the Taos area have all become part of how I see the world and make things.
“I try to live for the experience of being alive. The places I go, the people I meet, and the natural world around me all become a part of me. In a universe this vast, the fact that any of us get to be here at all feels like a miracle. I’m grateful to be a part of it, and grateful that I get to make things from it.”
Around that same time, an older friend gave me her late father’s stone collection and remaining jewelry tools. He had been a collector in Northern California, so the collection included an incredible variety of material, including old-stock minerals that are difficult to find now. Suddenly, I had all kinds of stones to practice on and turn into cabochons.
During a class trip to a lapidary shop in Taos, I noticed some unused equipment and asked the owner about it. That same week, I sold my 1973 VW Beetle and used the money to buy a Diamond Pacific Titan cabochon cutter. A few days later, I bought a six-inch diamond saw, followed less than a month later by a ten-inch saw.
Now I had everything I needed to cut and polish the stones I had collected. Soon, I had trays full of cabochons and a new problem: I needed to do something with them.
So I started making jewelry.
I set up a small jewelry bench using my grandfather’s shed and slowly began collecting tools. As people learned about my new passion, tools and materials came to me from family, friends, and unexpected places. Eventually, the little bench wasn’t enough.
When the pandemic shut everything down in 2020, I used the unexpected time at home to invest in better tools and build a dedicated jewelry studio.
By then, my dad had retired from plumbing and returned to making jewelry. I occasionally traveled with him to craft shows around the region and loved meeting the people who connected with something I had made enough to take it home. Eventually, I knew I wanted a place to develop my own work and identity.