Port Townsend Gallery is featuring five area jewelers for its December show, which opens during this month’s Art Walk on Saturday evening, Dec. 3.

The jewelry show is an annual event, said Mitchel Osborne, who handles communications at the gallery.

This year’s featured jewelers, many of whom have a local following, have created special new pieces for the show, he said.

“It’s a really big show for them,” said Osborne, “so they go all out for it.”

“The jewelry is of national caliber,” Osborne said of the pieces displayed, with prices ranging from $6 to $3,000.

“The jewelers we have are really quite talented and do some really beautiful pieces.”

Featured artists are Addy Thornton, Andrea Guarino-Slemmons, Shirley Moss, Caroline Littlefield and Stephanie Oliveira.

Thornton, who has lived in Port Townsend for six years, has been making silver jewelry on and off for the past 30 years.

Her work is inspired by nature.

“I’m out in the forests practically every day,” she said. “I’m looking at mushrooms and mold and moss – close-ups, faraway patterns, colors and the leaves.”

She also works with crystals in a healing modality, and the energy work carries over into her jewelry, she said.

One of her pieces features stylized versions of Chinese writing – “beautiful, loving affirmation words,” she said.

Guarino-Slemmons, who has lived in Port Townsend for 26 years, has been designing jewelry for about the same length of time. In the past 10 years, she has begun pursuing silversmithing. The Port Townsend Gallery show is to feature her hand-forged bracelets and sterling silver earrings.

Like Thornton,

Guarino-Slemmons said her work is inspired by nature – the ocean and water that surround the Olympic Peninsula.

“I guess it’s the forms of nature” she said. “The colors of nature, the flow of things.” Her love of nature appears in the names she creates for her jewelry, such as her “wave bracelets.”

She said she enjoys walking on local beaches and collecting treasures from nature, too. All of the glass she uses in her sterling silver earrings is from “Glass Beach,” near North Beach, she said.

Shirley Moss has specialized in making chains for the past 46 years, the last 19 of which have been in Port Townsend. “I think of it as meditation in metal,” said Moss, who also manages the Port Townsend Food Bank.

Self-titled “The Chainmaker,” she is currently concentrating on combining 14-karat gold with sterling silver, creating “a marriage of metals,” she said. She shows her work at the Port Townsend Gallery, and also sells her metalwork at various places throughout the region, including a booth at the Saturday farmers market in Uptown.

The Port Townsend Gallery is also featuring the work of Oliveira and Littlefield.

Oliveira has been creating jewelry for more than 30 years, specializing in silver and gold. Her interest in jewelry making was sparked by a class at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York.

Littlefield’s work is influenced by nature and her Celtic heritage. She been making silver jewelry since the 1970s. She plans to show pendants and earrings made of precious metal clay, along with forged silver Celtic brooches and hair pins.

The Port Townsend Gallery is located at 715 Water St. The community is invited to join the artists for a Art Walk reception from 5:30 to 8 p.m., Saturday, Dec. 3.