So we kicked off our Elva Fields: Friends and Family project earlier this year (more posts to come on that front soon) and we're now starting a spin-off series about which we're super excited.  Friends and Family: The Photographer Series enlists the help (and amazing talents) of a few of our friends and family members.  The plan?  Armed with a pair of earrings from our June collection (their choice) and a camera, we asked them to capture the jewels in a setting or situation of their choosing--portrait, landscape, style subject--and let us brag about how beautiful their work is.  Hope you enjoy the results as much as we did...starting with our friend Jill Hardy below!

Jill and I became fast friends in 2nd grade when we both moved to Kentucky, and we spent many a weekend engulfed in the latest craft project/fiasco/brainstorm we concocted.  (One such creation that immediately comes to mind involved 20-some-odd emptied perfume sample bottles refilled with custom-colored liquids and suspended from wired mobiles.)  Clearly neither of us strayed far from the art we loved in elementary school:  Jill became a photographer, I still work with wire. 

photo by Lois Bielefeld

Nowadays (well, on the days she isn't cooking something wildly exotic or enriching her newfound carpentry skills as she works on her and her husband's mid-century home) Jill is an official museum educator at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, after studying Art History and Photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Museology at the University of Washington.  Her photography--wedding, maternity, and product--is dedicated to capturing the decisive moment, and we couldn't wait to see the moment(s) Jill captured with our African brass hoop earrings (available in May with our Summer 2011 Collection.)  Decisive and entirely gorgeous, we think.  Many thanks to Jill for her friendship and for sharing her beautiful images with us.