Whenever Gemma accumulated a few dozen pieces, she held a sale. All it took was the right photo and just a few seconds to get the word out on Instagram, where she had close to a hundred thousand followers. Today, she piled three chunky rings on her right forefinger and snapped a shot and posted with the caption: How sweet is this? New Rock Candy rings available now . . .

Her Rock Candy rings sold out as fast as she could make them, gold-plated, sterling silver, and fourteen-karat-gold rings set with large semiprecious gemstones: bright citrines, sumptuous lavender amethysts, rich amber quartz. She also offered a costume-jewelry version in gold-plated brass with cushion-cut, colored glass “stones.”

To Gemma, costume jewelry was just as precious as real jewelry. Sure, if you took an expensive diamond and set it in expensive platinum it would be appealing. But it took imagination and craft to transform non-precious metal and rhinestones, beads, or glass into something equally compelling. When she looked back at work by Elsa Schiaparelli from the 1950s, playing with color and shape to make crystal bracelets as extraordinary as anything diamond, she understood the true power of creation.

Gemma pushed her furniture and tools to one side of the room. Aside from the foldaway daybed, her apartment was dominated by jewelry-making equipment she’d bought with the dwindling remains of a small inheritance from her paternal grandmother, her nana—the woman who raised her after her parents’ deaths when she was eight years old. Nana had only seen the apartment once. That was enough.

“How, Gemma Louise, can you live this way?”

Anne Maybrook was a simple woman from Pennsylvania farm country who didn’t understand why Gemma couldn’t be happy attending a more local school like Penn State. Or, if Gemma really wanted to be fancy about it and got a scholarship, she could apply to her late father’s alma mater, Cornell. “But,” Nana warned, “it was that kind of uppity crowd that got him into trouble in the first place. Filled his head with ideas about moving to the city—ideas that didn’t turn out so great in the end, did they?”

Gemma told her that New York School of Design was the best place for the career—the future—that she wanted.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Nana said.

Gemma had been so certain that she’d have the chance to show her grandmother that she had nothing to worry about, that she’d become a successful jewelry designer and make her proud. But Nana passed away in her sleep a few years ago, not living to see her graduate NYSD, never mind become a success.