Carefully selecting the brightest colored stones, she grabs her pliers and begins bending the wire. Delicately placing each stone right after the other she begins hand crafting an elegant necklace.

Silvia Peluso, 46, art major, is a jewelry maker in her sixth semester at EC who hopes to make her jewelry passion into a career.

Peluso makes every piece of her jewelry with a story behind each item, emphasizing that she wanted to send a message with intention.

“I want to send a message out to people that’s going beyond the beautiful piece of jewelry,” Peluso said. “You wear it for a purpose.”

Her work has recently been paid off when she was featured in a jewelry magazine called Bell Armoire.

“In order to be successful, you have to be passionate about something,” Peluso said. “Once you know your passion, you have to know what you want.”

As a teenager, Peluso said she pined for unique pieces of jewelry with a mystical, other worldly feel.

Years later, she became a part-time assistant in a metaphysical store where they introduced her to the power and energy of crystals.

“I developed an intimate attraction to these stones, finding them much too beautiful to carry around in my pockets,” Peluso said.

So she taught herself how to wire wrap the stones and wear them as jewelry.

“Soon after that,” she said. “People began asking me to make jewelry for them.”

Peluso has many dreams and goals ahead of her.

“My goal is to become so good that I can showcase my work in galleries,” Peluso said.

From teaching classes to doing shows, Peluso wants people to be happy with her jewelry and know that she has different intentions other than just selling them.

She said her challenges as a jewelry maker, was that she wishes she had more time to make everything.

“A day only has twenty four hours,” Peluso said. “I have so much in my head and I stress out because I can only do a certain amount when there is much more to create.”

However, Peluso said she would not consider hiring people to make her work nor would she consider using machines to get the job done faster.

“I bring out the energy, my vision, and spirituality into it so I don’t want to have a machine make it,” Peluso said.

Classmates of Peluso have also seen her determination and hard work during class.

“I’m inspired by her work,” Bonnie Pio, jewelry maker, said. “I like her work because it’s aesthetic.”

Even Peluso’s jewelry professor,  Irene Mori, has seen the incentive work she puts into her creations and is often surprised at what she comes up with.

“I give her an assignment and she does twice the work,” Mori said. “She totally takes the ball and gets it rolling.”