Hands on, heart in

Puget Sound choices, June 27, 1996 Style
By Bill Timnick

Kit Kuhn is often pleased to hear that customers have visited other jewelers before they come to his Gig Harbor store. “Men,’ he explains, “they can really see the difference.’ Kuhn is the owner of Kit A Jeweler Designed for You, located at 3104 Harborview Drive in Gig Harbor, where he has been making custom jewelry for five years. Before opening his current workshop and store, Kuhn made and sold his works from a 9 by 12 foot space set above Gig Harbor’s W.B. Scott’s restaurant. Of course, Kit Kuhn’s career designing and crafting jewelry has an even longer history. He discovered the jewelry section of his school’s art department when he was 13 years old, in Colorado, working first in silver, which he learned to inlay with crushed turquoise,and coral.

When he was 15, Kuhn was given a chance to spend a month learning the subject of his choice full time for credit. He chose to work in a local jewelry store, where he acquired new skills in filing and polishing metal, and learning to display jewelry in the store’s glass cases. Kuhn was also creating a home workshop for himsell ‘Every time I had a birthday I would ask for took he recalls. “it took a lot for my parents to let me have a torch in my room. ” By this time, he had begun to sell the piece he’d created to local stores. “I had a business license when I was 15 years old:’ he says. But he had to ride the bus when calling on his clients. Kuhn took jewelry making classes at ftee local high schools, and a community college as his interest and expertise continued to grow. He also entered his works in art shows. One competition earned him a schol- arship to the Califomia College of Arts and Craft in Oakland. This led to a series of work and educational experiences, a kind of self-designed apprenticeship which would occupy the young jeweler for the next several years. He wanted to work with a dozen or so professional jewelers and goldsmiths, to learn their techniques firsthand. So he did. Kuhn’s self-styled program took him to Stockholm, Sweden for nearly a year, then to a “small goldsmithing school” in Oregon, for 2.5 years, then back to Colorado to work in a small jewelry store.”That’s where I learned the most,” he recalls.

Once he had set a goal to open a store of his own, Kuhn went in search of a permanent base from which to build a reputation as a custom jewelry designer and craftsman. He traveled around the Northwest, eventually coming upon the Gig Harbor community. “And I fell in love with it.’ Initially, he placed his work in other Puget Sound area stores, two in the Gig Harbor area, as well as in Issaquah, Bellevue, and in Seattle’s Pioneer Square. “Eventually, I started selling more than these stores were,’ he remembers, so he moved the display cases he’d built while in high school into his first solo Gig Harbor space.  “I took all the gold I had and made new pieces. But then I didn’t have any left for repair work.” As sales grew, however, Kuhn used some of the proceeds to buy more materials – silver, gold, gemstones. Today, he says, the pieces he creates “are still part of me.” He estimates that some 85 percent of his products are sold before he begins work on them. “Many stores tell people what to do,” Kuhn explains. “I ask them what they want me to do.” All of the work, from basic design, to cutting and polishing, and stone-setting is done on site. And each piece is virtually unique. Kuhn often begins by interviewing each customer, and produces a drawing that represents a pooling of the ideas contributed by goldsmith and client. One currently popular ring design is a recreation, in several types of gold (white, yellow and rose), of mountains of mountain ranges that have some personal meaning for the customer (or couple). (One California pair, for example, asked Kuhn to design a ring that contained whales and water, two mountains and some sailboats.) ‘We faxed pictures back and forth.” Another customer presented Kuhn with an agate taken from her driveway. ‘I cut the agate to looke like her sports car,’ he recalls and mounted the cut stone in the ring he designed.