Lorraine Hornby is a certified gemologist and has a degree in jewelry fabrication. She is a master designer and uses color, balance, texture and form as she creates each piece. Her beautifully designed silver jewelry is the culmination of her training, art sense and time spent imagining the many variations leading to the actual creation of the work.

Kevin O’Grady is known throughout the U.S. and Japan as the most exciting and talented glass bracelet maker today. His creative and unique use of color is unmatched in the borosilicate world. Kevin’s Pyrex bracelets, marbles, and Splash of Glass collections are both high-tech and artistic.

Kevin is also known for his collectable beads, marbles and paperweights. Each piece is a signed, one of a kind, unique work of art. Kevin has work in galleries and shops throughout the U.S. and Japan including the Corning Museum of Glass in New York.

In December 2001, Katie Schroeder’s professional career took a major turn while working an art show at Schroeder Studio Gallery.  She saw beautiful fused glass jewelry and expressed an interest in learning more about the process.  Katie was fortunate to work with longtime friend and glass artist Sherry Salito-Forsen during which time she was exposed to all aspects of the glass fusing.

Katie’s creative skills and ease with spatial design allowed her to quickly ramp up in the field, leading to the creation of one-of-a-kind pendants, earrings, tie tacks and bracelets.  She also collaborates with Francis Lai-Wang who adds sterling silver and precious stones to select pieces.  In addition to jewelry, Katie designs custom backsplash tiles for kitchens and bathrooms as well as knobs and pulls for drawers and dressers.

Katie graduated from Concordia University, Irvine in 1999 with a major in Humanities with an emphasis in Art.

Linda’s work incorporates her own handmade fused dichroic art glass with sterling silver in whimsical and fun patterns.  She uses the kinetic qualities of dichroic glass to create depth, movement and intensity.  Each glass piece is unique because Linda continuously experiments with her medium, adding metals and crushed glass to her kiln-fired pieces. She has developed a special technique in assembling the glass for fusing.

Over the years her jewelry has been showcased internationally in art galleries and museum stores including Freehand Gallery in West Hollywood and the Museum of Neon Art in Downtown Los Angeles.

Frances Lai Wang was born in China and immigrated to the United States when her father became the director of the Chinese section at the United Nations. She received her Bachelors degree from Hollins College and her Masters degree in Chemistry/Math from the University of Illinois. She later returned to California State University at Long Beach and received her BA in Fine Arts in 1989 and studied sculpture at CSULB.

Wang has exhibited her work at the “Artisan Showcase” at the Orange County Museum, the California State University Museum at Long Beach and the Bowers Museum store, as well as numerous galleries and art shows.

Eduardo Milieris was born in 1960 in Montevideo, Uruguay. An exhibit of Alexander Calder’s work gave him his first, and longest-lasting influence in art. After the show he went home, painted his first “sunny-side-ups”, and converted them into clocks. Eduardo was seven years old.

From 1985 to 1990, Milieris attended the School of Liberal Arts in Montevideo, where he experimented with photography, video art and sculpture. It was there he conceived and built his signature work, the Slow Reading Clock: a piece comprised of three, one-handed dials, each dial reading the hours, minutes, and seconds respectively. It was a natural step toward the beginning of his company, Watchcraft ®.

With more than 100 unique watches in its line, Watchcraft® is represented by over 400 galleries, and museum stores around the world.

Zulugrass™ Jewelry is handmade by the Maasai women of Kenya in East Africa. The basic product is a 27″ strand/loop that can be worn in at least 15 different ways.

The Zulugrass Story
The Maasai are a pastoral group of people that live in the magnificent Great Rift Valley of Kenya and Tanzania. A terrible drought that ended in 2001 lasted several years and devastated pasture lands. The Maasai’s livelihood disappeared as their cattle died. The men had to drive the few remaining cattle hundreds of miles away to search for better grazing and it became evident that the women desperately needed a way to obtain medical supplies, and to feed, clothe, and educate their children.

Philip and Katy Leakey, who live among the Maasai in the Kenyan bush, wanted to help their neighbors and to provide work opportunities without changing their culture. They came up with an imaginative idea that would utilize the excellent beading abilities of the Maasai women, and it used grass, an available sustainable resource, as the primary element.

Soon the women were harvesting grass, one blade at a time. The long grass was dried and cut into bead-size pieces and dyed lovely hues - blues, greens, reds, yellows, pinks, purples, earth and natural tones - which were then strung into necklaces and bracelets. The Leakeys added brilliant Czech glass beads to their designs, mixing them wit the soft luster of the grass beads and giving sparkle and a contemporary flair to the jewelry. Zulugrass was born.

In short order, the women learned that they could bring their babies and toddlers with them and they would be paid by the piece as they chose to work.  Now over 400 hundred Maasai women are making Zulugrass while continuing to lead their lives in their traditional life style, and they can use their income to better their lives as they wish.

Philip and Katy Leakey’s inspiration gave birth to Zulugrass - the beautiful jewelry handcrafted by experts, the Maasai women of Kenya. Zulugrass continues to provide much needed and desired opportunity for these wonderful women and their families.