Love Of The Ocean And Music Inspires Falmouth Artist | Arts & Entertainment

Rogers grew up in Middleborough and attended the University of Vermont as an environmental science major.

While still a college student, she began to get interested in jewelry, learning macramé and making necklaces. “Jewelry-making became something of a thread throughout my life after that,” Rogers said.

After moving to the Cape, Rogers first worked at Camp Lyndon in Sandwich, where arts and crafts were an integral part of her job, along with outdoor education and team-building among the campers. “I would always do the jewelry-making, teaching the kids how to bead and things like that,” she said.

In addition to her studies at the University of Vermont, Rogers finished her bachelor’s degree at Bridgewater State University, staying in school an extra semester to minor in art.

“I’m really grateful that I took all those courses,” Rogers said. “My work was exhibited and I got a lot of great feedback. I learned about different artistic principles that I really had no idea about. The two-dimensional work was probably my favorite. I loved the color aspect, the specific guidelines and how precise everything was.”

While enrolled at Bridgewater, Rogers interned with the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe’s oyster farm, First Light Shellfish Farm.

While they were working, one of the Tribal members pulled a whelk shell out of the sea and said they were going to make beads with it. Rogers said it had never dawned on her to make jewelry from shells, even though she knew that during the Victorian era, Italian cameos were sometimes made from whelk shells.

“My brother is a lobsterman and had recently gotten his conch license, so I asked him to send me some because I was so inspired,” she said. That’s when it all started.”

Once she had some shells, Rogers began teaching herself how to cut them.

She described the process of learning how to cut and shape her designs as one that was long and “full of trial and error.”

“I started at WHOI during that time and I was working in the mooring lab, sometimes called the rigging shop or buoy lab. I didn’t really know how to use a lot of power tools back then; I was learning and building moorings, I had no idea how much I loved working with my hands,” she said.

Rogers said it was no secret in her department that she was making jewelry during her off-hours.

“I was learning all these new tools and would ask the guys all the time if they had any suggestions. I started with a Dremel at first, which was probably not safe in retrospect; shell dust is really toxic for your lungs, she said.

“There are a lot of artists at WHOI, so it was well received by lots of folks and they had lots of ideas. One gentleman suggested that I get a wet saw and found one for me on Craigslist.”

Things started taking off from there, Rogers said. “The wet saw was significantly faster and safer. You sort of discover all these things along the way.”

Rogers works with sea scallop shells in addition to whelk.

“I love the iridescence and people are really drawn to the white color,” she said.

Along with receiving help from her co-workers at WHOI, Rogers apprenticed with the late Andrew Groag, founder of Elfstone Silver & Gold in Mashpee Commons.

“He was instrumental in helping me to elevate the quality of my work,” Rogers said. “He was such a good mentor. He would notice little details and he was just so encouraging.

“He gave me his old polishing machine and I started hand-polishing the shells. You can really see the difference. I do the polishing, but I also make raw pieces at a different price point, which is nice in this economy.”

Rogers’s designs include shell pieces shaped into orbs, hearts, rhombuses and crescent moons. Shell spirals are fashioned into earrings and necklaces, sometimes with the addition of turquoise, quartz and other crystals. Rogers also has heart-shaped holiday ornaments made from the large sea scallop shells. The natural colors of the shells range from white to a rich, warm tangerine color.

“I love to honor the cultural history, but I specifically do not make wampum because I’m not Tribal,” Rogers said. “I want to have my own designs and nontraditional shapes using the whelk and the sea scallops.”

Rogers said she was determined to come up with a way for the pieces to turn while they were being worn. “I had created the earring to be beautiful on both sides and I wanted to showcase the backs,” she said.

As a music enthusiast (her husband Rich is a disk jockey on MVY Radio), Rogers said she could envision her earring designs “dancing on my ears, but there were no components available that would allow both sides of the earring to be seen.”

When it came to innovating a swivel device for her jewelry, Rogers was again influenced by her coworkers at WHOI. “Working around all those engineers and seeing how they problem solve, it’s similar to the art world; we draw a storyboard and they make their CAD drawings. Then you get pieces fabricated and put them together. Sometimes it’s perfect the first iteration, sometimes it’s not,” she said.

The swivel mechanism Rogers eventually came up with is unique to her jewelry: “When you wear them, you can see both sides, which is like a two-for-one.”

In addition to being inspired by the materials she’s working with, Rogers said, she’s inspired by finding the Fibonacci sequence in nature.

“It’s so beautiful and if you think about it, it really starts to blow your mind, how is it even possible, these perfect spirals on both ends?” she said. “I could see the swivel in that as well and I just really wanted to do something with those pieces.”

After moving from a rental and buying a home in 2020, Rogers was able to create a workshop in her house.

“I consider myself a spiritual person and all of those worlds come together when I get to do this work. I get to be in my studio, listening to music, making art, working with this spiral and meditating on it. It’s fascinating to me,” she said.

To avoid copycats, Rogers has a copyright on one of her designs. “Oftentimes I’m at shows and people will say, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before,’ and there’s almost no better compliment,” she said.

After years of giving jewelry to friends and family, Rogers began selling her jewelry in 2021 at Handworks in Woods Hole and at various local art markets.

As a mother of two high schoolers who works full time, jewelry making is a “nights and weekends thing.”

“I spend a lot of the year making inventory for the holiday season,” Rogers said. “The pieces themselves are extremely time-consuming.”

Rogers launched her website (capecodbooty.com) this year and is focusing on acquiring wholesale customers. Currently her work can be found on the WHOI website and in its gift shop, Tide and True in Onset, Elfstone Silver & Gold in Mashpee Commons and the Yoga Collaborative in North Falmouth. People can also visit Rogers at her studio by emailing the artist to make an appointment.

Rogers said one of her favorite parts of making her jewelry is matching up cut whelk shell pieces to make earrings. “They are all so different. I’ll turn them so that the stripes are sort of the same way. See these two; they have the white on the bottom, so they are a match. It doesn’t just come like that; I have to make sure I’m cutting it in the right spots. I feel like a lot of my two-dimensional work comes into play when I’m matching up two pieces for earrings.”

Depending on what she is making, Rogers said she can get at least four pieces out of one whelk shell.

For other entrepreneurs, Rogers offered this advice: “You chip away at it. That’s what I’ve been doing all these years. Chip away and try and reach one of your goals. Just keep picking away at it a little bit at a time and celebrate those small milestones. Try not to get too down on yourself if you don’t meet that goal. There’s always next year.”

In addition to her jewelry, Rogers said, her favorite project was a memorial bench on Washburn Island she helped create in memory of Damien Palanza, who died in 2016.

“Like the encouragement from Andrew, the bench gave me the confidence to go for it,” Rogers said.