U.K. jeweler Alison Macleod is commemorating 20 years of her jewelry studio in the best way—with a new collection. Memoried, which pays homage to Macleod’s earliest memories of creating jewelry, pairs her signature Catkin technique with emerald—the traditional gemstone for a 20th anniversary—along with tourmaline, green sapphire, and diamonds.
Macleod’s Catkin technique renders a beautiful scale pattern—one that might be reminiscent of a mermaid’s tail, a currently hot image in pop culture. But the design, achieved by hammering individual disks and soldering them all into place, has far more history than the TikTok-birthed mermaidcore.
“As a student at Edinburgh College of Art, I had a Saturday job in a Celtic jewelry shop in Edinburgh,” Macleod tells JCK. “A customer had come in to have a repair done, and on her finger she had this antique-looking ring with a kind of fish-scaley pattern on it. When my husband, Paul, and I went to get married, I wanted to make myself a wedding ring. The memory of this ring 10 years before came back into my head, and I gave myself two weeks to develop the idea. I didn’t want it to be an engraved pattern; I wanted it to be layered. So that’s where all the little discs came from.
“My inspiration has always been about antiques and objects directly from nature,” says Macleod. “My friend saw and likened it to a catkin flower, which you get on hazel trees and other kinds of trees in springtime. I liked the poetic nature that Paul and I were getting married in springtime, and it was this kind of symbol of new beginnings and things. That’s where the technique of that layering got its name from.”
The Memoried collection is sensational for summer: Incorporating shades of green and blue along with those seaworthy scales, it tells a tale of an underwater world, the kind where mermaids are real and adventures never end. But that’s just one interpretation—from a mind always dreaming of the sea. For Macleod, the collection evokes memories of a childhood spent outdoors.
“The colors are not quite earthy but a palette reminiscent of my beginnings and where I grew up—in the middle of nowhere,” the designer says. “As a child, they were the colors I could access via trees, bushes, and flowers, which my brothers and I always used to make wee dens [Scottish term for kid’s forts]. I would always make little things out of bits of slate and create drawings on them, which my friend and I would display in our dens like little galleries. So it’s reminiscent of the busyness of all that, of our galleries in the bushes.”
Now entering her third decade as a jeweler, Macleod has honed her aesthetic and learned a thing or two along the way. “I would advise budding designers to believe in themselves and not look,” she says. “It’s good to look at what’s happening around you design-wise, but try to develop your design style—that’s so important to carry you forward. Also [important is having] a thick skin, which doesn’t come naturally, I don’t think, to anyone, but you can build it up.
“That resilience will help to carry you through,” she continues, “because it’s not the easiest path when you’re doing your own thing. I started my business at 23, which felt natural then, but looking back, I was so young. That was quite good because I didn’t have children to support, so I could be freer and make mistakes. And that’s the thing: Over these 20 years I’ve made so many mistakes and learned from them, and I’m a better jeweler and a better businessperson.”
Top: Memoried Catkin ring in 18k yellow gold with blue tourmaline, 0.36 ct. emerald, and 0.07 ct. champagne diamond, £3,100 ($3,950); Alison Macleod
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