About Me

I’m Ruth. I’m 71. I’ve been making copper jewellery by hand in Hay-on-Wye for nearly fifty years.

I don’t have a factory. I don’t have a team. It’s just me, my bench, and my hands. Every piece you see on this site started as a flat sheet of raw copper. I cut it, hammer it, file it, and polish it myself. Always have.

I never set out to build a business. I set out to understand why my mother never slowed down.

My mother wore copper every single day of her life. 

Her own mother gave her a copper bangle as a girl. She never took it off. Not once. Not in the bath, not in the garden, not at the sink.

She lived to 96.

She never took a tablet for her joints. Never woke up stiff. Never planned her day around what her body would allow. At 90, she was still peeling potatoes with hands that didn’t shake. Still walking to the shops. Still telling us we were being dramatic.

We called her lucky. She called us foolish.

“You lot stopped wearing copper and started wondering why everything hurts.”

She said that more times than I can count.

I didn’t listen. Not for years.

 I know what it feels like when your body turns on you. 

I was 51 when it started. My fingers were too stiff to button my coat before ten in the morning. My knees told me about the weather before the forecast did. I stopped opening jars. I stopped reaching for things on the top shelf. I stopped without even noticing I was stopping.

I tried the creams. The supplements. The expensive one from the chemist that worked for a week and then didn’t. I had a shelf full of half-finished bottles and a quiet belief that nothing worked for someone like me.

That’s the thought that does the most damage, by the way. Not the pain. The belief that this is just who you are now.

I carried that belief for years.

 I started wearing copper the week after her funeral. 

I didn’t expect anything. I did it because I missed her, and it felt like keeping a piece of her close.

Within a fortnight, I noticed my hands in the morning. Not because they hurt. Because they didn’t.

Within a month, my daughter said on the phone, “You sound more like yourself lately.”

I wasn’t lucky. I wasn’t special. I just finally did what my mother had been telling me to do my entire life.

 That’s when I started making copper for other women. 

Not as a product. Not as a brand. I started making pieces for friends who asked what had changed. Then their friends asked. Then strangers started finding me.

The women who wear my copper keep coming back. They don’t always explain why. But the ones who do say the same thing, in different words, every time.

“I feel like myself again.”

That sentence is why I still do this. Fifty years at the same bench, and that sentence still stops me.

 I’m not a company. I’m a woman at a bench. 

I source my copper myself, twice a year, from the same small suppliers I’ve worked with for decades. 99.9% pure. I test every batch. A fridge magnet slides right off real copper. If it sticks, it’s not copper. Most of what’s sold online isn’t.

Amazon contacted me twice. I said no both times. I don’t want my pieces in a warehouse next to imitations. I want to know they go to women who’ll actually wear them.

I make two batches a year. When they’re gone, they’re gone. I can’t make more until the copper comes in. And this year, my supplier can’t promise more until next year.

 Her bangle is on my wrist right now. 

The same one her mother gave her. The copper is darker now. Smoother. Warm from seventy years of skin. It’s the most beautiful thing I own.

I made yours with the same hands, from the same pure copper.

Too late to tell her she was right. But not too late for you.

Ruth, Hay-on-Wye, 2026

My Best-Selling Pieces