How I choose crystals for each piece, and why it matters.

People sometimes ask me how long it takes to make a necklace. I usually say something like four to six hours of actual making, but that isn't really the right answer. The making begins long before I pick up the first stone. It begins in the choosing.

The choosing of crystals for a piece is the part of my work that I find hardest to explain to people who haven't experienced it because it isn't a logical process. It isn't a checklist. It is something closer to listening.

What crystals actually are

Before I talk about how I choose, it seems worth saying something about what I believe crystals actually are because this shapes everything.

Crystals are not rocks. Or rather: they are rocks, but they are also something else. They are the result of millions of years of geological process, immense pressure, heat and time, and in that process, they develop a molecular structure of extraordinary precision and stability. Quartz crystal, for example, oscillates at an exact frequency when subjected to pressure. This is not spiritual speculation, it is the science that underlies every quartz watch ever made.

What the spiritual traditions add to this is the understanding that this oscillatory precision interacts with the human energy field. Different crystals vibrate at different frequencies, and different frequencies resonate with different aspects of our own energy - our chakras, our emotional body, our nervous system, our capacity to receive or to release.

I hold this understanding sincerely, as the operating principle behind everything I make.

When I choose a crystal for someone, it's not about selecting a pretty stone. I am selecting a frequency, a specific energetic medicine for a specific moment in a specific life.

The process

When I begin working on a bespoke piece, I spend time first simply listening. Sometimes this happens in a conversation with the person telling me where they are, what they are moving through, what they are trying to call in or release. Sometimes it happens through written words. And sometimes it happens in a more direct energetic way: I hold the intention of the person in my awareness, and I wait to see which stones begin to present themselves.

I have a large collection of raw and tumbled crystals in my studio. When I'm working on a commission, I will sometimes lay several possibilities out and sit with them quietly. One will feel more insistent than the others; its brighter, somehow, or more settled. This is the one I work with.

For the crystal collection, the pieces available to purchase without a bespoke conversation, I choose stones that I feel carry a broad and significant medicine. Citrine for abundance and solar energy. Celestite for calm and angelic connection. Aquamarine for the courage to speak truth and safe passage through transitions. Each stone I select for the collection is one I have worked with personally, that I trust completely, and that I have charged at an ancient site of land energy, so that it carries something of that extraordinary place within it.

Why the charging matters

Every crystal I work with is cleansed and charged before it becomes part of a piece. Cleansing removes any energy the stone has accumulated in transit, from mining, from handling, from the various hands it has passed through before it reaches me. Charging is something different: it is an active infusion of intention and energy.

I charge my crystals with land, solar and lunar energy. I chose this practice deliberately. For example, I take the stones to Stonehenge during the solstices as it is one of the most energetically significant sites on earth - five thousand years of ceremony, of prayer, of human beings standing in that circle and directing their attention toward something larger than themselves. At the Solstice, when the sun rises directly through the heel stone and the ancient alignments light up, the energy of that place is at its most extraordinary.

The stones I place there absorb something of that. I have no doubt about this.

What this means for you

Every piece of crystal healing jewellery that leaves my studio has been chosen with real attention, charged with real intention, and made with real care. These are not decorative objects. They are, in the truest sense of the word, prescriptions - medicine for the soul, selected for what you are carrying and what you are ready to receive.

If you're unsure which piece is right for you, reach out. The conversation is always part of the prescription.

Emily x