Jewelry Artists

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Janice Ruizzo

Just Add Some Peridot Green Lanyard
 Meet the Designer-Artist


Where do you live?
St. Cloud, Florida

Describe your artistic style.
I've been told that my work is organic. I like using stones, shell, and wire, with the occasional crystal wedding jewelry moments.

What inspires you as a designer-artist?
My brother in California is a rock hound, so I like to use jaspers of all kinds and even polymer clay beads that look like rocks or green seeds, leaves and beans.

What materials do you most enjoy working with?
Jaspers, polymer clay, 14-gauge brass wire from the hardware store.

What is the name of the piece you submitted with your success story?
Just Add Some Peridot Green Lanyard

What inspired this design?
I needed a lanyard to hold my ID card for a Caribbean cruise.

How did it come together?
Color. Peridot and lime green are good colors for me. This lanyard has my own polymer clay beads, green seed beads and shell beads, plus my favorite 14-gauge brass for the freeform wire lanyard holder.

Share Your Background


When and how did you begin making jewelry/beading?
I am a Real Estate broker. When we sold our brokerage the market got very slow, so we semi-retired for a couple of years. I started out trying to repair a favorite bracelet. First restringing with elastic, then memory wire, then beading wire. I became hooked!

Who introduced you to beading?
Entirely self-taught, with help of magazines, Youtube videos, and how-to books.

Do you have an artistic background?
Sewed all my dresses in junior year and high school, even made prom dresses. Quilted for many years, crocheted afghans and sweaters in the RI winters.

How did you discover Fire Mountain Gems and Beads®?
Bead and Button magazine. Ordered exclusively from you for several years. Now I have found local wholesale bead stores too.

What other hobbies do you have?
Singing in a barbershop quartet if I only had time.

Beading Success


What role does jewelry-making play in your life?
If I could make a living at it, I would make jewelry full-time. As it is I have hundreds of pieces made, over the years since 2008. I do spend hours every week in the studio, messing it up, cleaning it up. I am always looking for a way to make a quality product that looks like a million bucks, but cost me three dollars to make. That is an accomplishment.

If you used jewelry-making as a way to bring in income, how are you selling yourself and your jewelry?
Etsy website, www.jansgemsnjades.etsy.com and Craft fairs in Central Florida. Entered one contest.

Any advice for aspiring jewelry-artists?
Expect to be totally in love with crystals and pearls, then move on to wirework, then making your own clasps, then your own head pins, then your own beads, then exploring color, and on and on. Keep all your bead magazines and your Fire Mountain catalogs. You will use them all for reference, and to try something new.

View all of Janice's designs in the Gallery of Designs.