At seven years old, selling penny-candy in his grandparents’ grocery, Sessin created his first piece of jewelry. The cola delivery man came in one day wearing a bottle-cap pin that caught Sessin’s eye. The man showed Sessin how to lift the cork out of the bottle cap with his pocketknife. Then he set the cap against his shirt-front, slid the cork disk under the shirt and pressed it back into the cap, pinching the cloth in between. Sessin copied the man’s movements using his own shirt. “I felt like such a big shot,” Sessin laughs, “but that piece was so simple, so fun, that it kind of stuck with me.”

Perhaps more than any other characteristic, this sense of fun and simplicity marks each Sessin design to this day. Working primarily with silver, Sessin likes the fact that he can create larger pieces and still keep costs down. “You can really play with silver,” he finds. “Add a little gold and some semi-precious stones and all of a sudden it’s not just silver anymore.” Sessin believes that “the larger pieces really show the care you take in working the silver.”

His favorite pieces are bracelets, wide cuff styles in particular. People tend to shy away from bracelets somewhat, Sessin says, because they haven’t had one that truly fit well. “I like a piece of jewelry to be comfortable, . . . so much so that a person wants to wear it every day because it fits so well.”

Inspired by the human form and the colors found in nature, Sessin’s designs begin with an idea. The idea takes form as he sizes, shapes and curves the silver and decides how much gold to add and where it should go. Next, Sessin adds a gemstone for color and texture. “Nothing,” Sessin says, “beats the colors found in nature.” Finding—then hand-carving—the gemstone is an intuitive process; a matter of allowing his hands to transform the conceptual into the corporeal, giving physical form to the design he first saw in his imagination.

“In my work,” he says, “I try to find something that hasn’t been seen. Something simple, but memorable.” Something that makes people see a commonplace thing in a way they hadn’t before, in a way that they’ll remember for a long time. Something, maybe, like a bottle cap?

You can reach Sessin directly by e-mailing to: sessin@iwaynet.net