Carla Reiter’s jewelry is unmistakable. Earthy, with a very strong handmade feel, her knitted silver, gold, and copper jewelry is made one piece at a time in her small studio.

Carla’s jewelry is the product of a lifetime of exploration filtered through an artist’s sensibility. Born in Palo Alto, California and raised in the Midwest, Carla has lived in New York City, California, Texas, and England. She went to Indiana University to study silversmithing but switched to sculpture after absorbing the rudiments of jewelry technique.

She graduated with a degree in art and spent the next 20-odd years investigating the world. She studied physics, earned a graduate degree in cultural anthropology, and worked as a journalist, museum curator, and nightclub singer.

But all the while she was making jewelry, teaching herself the techniques required to make the work she envisioned. In 1997 she decided to devote herself to jewelry full time and opened her studio.

Carla began knitting metal in order to make a necklace she imagined and couldn’t make any other way. The possibilities of the technique captivated her, as did the way it felt to wear. “It’s surprisingly soft and caressing,” she says. “Very sensual.”

She also began to use copper, richly patinated and set with small diamonds. “That tiny sparkle in the dark of the patinated copper is beautiful to me,” she says. “And I like its just-excavated feel.”

Each piece in Carla’s limited-production and one-of-a-kind collection is made with a woman’s body in mind. “When I’m working, I’m constantly trying the piece on, tweaking the way the forms interact with my body – a collarbone, a wrist bone. When the piece is lying on a pad being photographed it’s flat. Something crucial is missing. It needs a body to complete it.”

“Someone once said to me that my jewelry only ‘wakes up’ when you put it on. That seems right to me.”