Of a Kind
Pink Double Crystal Studs by Better Late Than Never for Of a Kind
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The Tools that Won Sara Dudzinsky’s Heart
This jeweler’s favorite part of the design process is getting to play with fire.
At first, constructing jewelry was plain boring for Sara Dudzinsky, who makes stunning, petite pieces out of her Portland, Oregon, studio. “When I was in school, I remember taking a production class and hating it—and thinking I could never make the same thing a million times in a row,” she explains. “But that’s what I’m doing, and I love it.” Now, she finds the intensity—and the hard-core tools—tremendously alluring. These are four devices that she can’t wait to play with day in and day out.
Pliers: “I use them for everything, even just folding bezels around a stone. I’m very adept with pliers. I use two at once a lot—one in each hand.”
Jeweler’s Saw: “That’s used for cutting little pieces out. When I make a ring with a crystal, I form the bezel around the crystal, solder it down onto a flat sheet, and then cut out the band.”
A stack of some of Sara’s rings, one with a dangling crystal.
Hammers: “A lot of my necklaces have a little geometric-shape detail, and I’ve started to do some free-form bangles. For those, I take wire, bend it into a shape with pliers, solder the ends, and hammer them flat. I have some shapes that I’m going off of, but I like each one to be unique.”
Torch and Striker: “I get the tank for my torch from a welder’s supply store, so it looks kind of like a cast-iron helium tank. It has a little regulator on it and a torch chip. So I turn it on, strike the striker, and out comes the flame. That’s probably my favorite part of doing the metal work—the fire. It’s a significant part of the process because almost everything that I do has at least one soldered joint.”
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Sara Dudzinsky Shops the Pacific Northwest
Locals know best—and this one has killer taste.
Sara Dudzinsky, the designer behind Better Late Than Never, is a Portland girl. She also makes some of the most surprising but understated jewelry we’ve ever seen—tiny, rough crystal earrings and slender hammered rings. Which makes her exactly the sort of person you want showing you around her own city and the upper left coast’s other much-loved locale, Seattle. These are the six places where she always finds the best stuff (aside from the stores that sell her own work, course).
PORTLAND
The Golden Rule
“There are a lot of great shops in the 811 East Burnside Building. Wendy, who runs this place, always has a ton of amazing vintage clothing for sale, and she does a rotating gallery exhibition. All the people who work there are volunteers—they just really want to give as much money to the artists that they’re showing as possible.” (goldenruleportland.com)
Sword+Fern
“On that same block as The Golden Rule, there’s a beautifully curated place called Sword+Fern. Emily Baker, the owner, has all sorts of home goods and accessories, and she also has her own jewelry line, which is awesome. It’s funny: Right now, we’re using some similar materials—crystals, seashells, stuff like that—but our work is so different.”
(swordandfern.com)
Blackbird
“Blackbird has a location in Seattle and one in Portland. They have a little bit of womenswear but great menswear—and they also carry a lot of great body products. I’m obsessed with Malin+Goetz, and they carry all of their stuff. The guys that run it are super nice. They are really into chatting with you—it’s a very personalized shopping experience.” (blackbirdballard.com)
Canoe
“Canoe is fantastic. We just bought Hearth ceramics for our house, and we went there and picked them all out. I have my eye on this crazy, fancy mechanical pencil for my boyfriend, and they have some really amazing wood-slice cutting boards. They have a great online store, too.” (canoeonline.net)
SEATTLE
Totokaelo
“Totokaelo has a super clean aesthetic—very modern and white. Last time I was there, the jewelry was hung up on the wall with colored tape—literally just taped straight to the wall. It was really unique. I have a Shabd bag—a tie-dye one with a rope handle—that I bought there.” (totokaelo.com)
Lambs Ear Shoes
“If you want some amazing shoes, this is the place to go. The owner introduced me to LD Tuttle. I haven’t thrown down for a pair yet, but I’ve been obsessed with the line for a while.” (lambsearshoes.com)
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Sara Dudzinsky Makes the Best Turkey Ever
She and her chef BF invite you into their kitchen.
Sara waiting to chow down at The Bent Brick.
Both Sara Dudzinsky and her boyfriend, Will Preisch, are passionate creative-types: She’s the designer of minimalist, earthy jewelry line Better Late Than Never, and he’s the chef at Portland, Oregon’s The Bent Brick, one of the buzziest restaurants in one of the top food towns. They can also often be found standing over a stove together at home, and this turkey recipe that allows you to work ahead has become their Thanksgiving go-to. “We made it for the first time four or five years ago—not long after we moved back to Portland,” Sara says. In short: It tastes like home.
Don’t miss out on one of Sara’s other very tempting creations: The sea urchin earrings that she created for Of a Kind.
Sara & Will’s Thanksgiving Turkey
“This method of cooking a turkey is very untraditional—and yields delicious results. We cook the dark meat and the white meat separately and we confit the legs and wings in duck fat, while roasting the breast on the bone.” —will
Ingredients:
Medium-size turkey
2 to 4 quarts duck fat (depending on the size of the turkey)
2 bunches thyme
2 bunches sage
2 heads garlic
Salt
Directions:
Two days before: Break down and season the bird.
Place the turkey on a cutting board. Remove the neck and the gizzards from the cavity; reserve these for gravy if you desire. Remove the legs from the turkey: Make an incision in the skin by the hip, where the leg attaches to the body. Repeat on the other leg. Pull both legs down and away from the backbone, dislocating the leg from the hip of the turkey. Run your knife down the exposed part of the thigh, separating the leg from the hip. Repeat on the other side. Snap the backbone of the turkey from the rib cage. You can do this with a towel and your hands or with a heavy chef’s knife. You will now have the turkey separated into three major sections: the turkey breasts attached to the rib cage (white meat), the turkey legs with wings (dark meat), and the materials for a stock if you’re making one (gizzards, back bone, and neck).
Chop the thyme, sage, and garlic well. Season the breast and the legs very generously with salt and rub them down with the thyme, sage, and garlic mixture. Refrigerate overnight, leaving the breast uncovered to help the skin get crispy in the oven.
One day before: Make the confit.
Preheat the oven to 250 degrees. Place the turkey legs in a large Dutch oven and cover with duck fat. Cook for 4 to 5 hours, until the turkey meat is falling off the bone. Let cool in the fat. Refrigerate overnight.
Day of: Prepare the breast and serve.
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Remove your turkey breast from the fridge and place it on the counter for two hours and allow it to come up to room temperature. Put the turkey breast on a roasting pan with a rack and place into the oven. The amount of time the turkey takes to cook depends on how big your turkey is. Since you aren’t cooking the breast and the leg at the same time, you don’t need to take your turkey to such a high temperature—this is why our turkey breast is going to be so juicy and delicious. Gauge its progress using a digital thermometer, take the turkey’s temperature at its thickest part: the center of the breast. Remove it from the oven when the thermometer reads 118-degrees and allow it to rest for 20 minutes on the stovetop.
While your turkey breast is roasting, reheat the turkey legs on the stove, melting the fat and heating them through. It should take about 45 minutes at a low simmer to prepare them.
Carve and serve the turkey breast and legs.
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Sara Dudzinsky Shops the Pacific Northwest
Locals know best—and this one has killer taste.
Sara Dudzinsky, the designer behind Better Late Than Never, is a Portland girl. She also makes some of the most surprising but understated jewelry we’ve ever seen—tiny, rough crystal earrings and slender hammered rings. Which makes her exactly the sort of person you want showing you around her own city and the upper left coast’s other much-loved locale, Seattle. These are the six places where she always finds the best stuff (aside from the stores that sell her own work, course).
PORTLAND
The Golden Rule
“There are a lot of great shops in the 811 East Burnside Building. Wendy, who runs this place, always has a ton of amazing vintage clothing for sale, and she does a rotating gallery exhibition. All the people who work there are volunteers—they just really want to give as much money to the artists that they’re showing as possible.” (goldenruleportland.com)
Sword+Fern
“On that same block as The Golden Rule, there’s a beautifully curated place called Sword+Fern. Emily Baker, the owner, has all sorts of home goods and accessories, and she also has her own jewelry line, which is awesome. It’s funny: Right now, we’re using some similar materials—crystals, seashells, stuff like that—but our work is so different.”
(swordandfern.com)
Blackbird
“Blackbird has a location in Seattle and one in Portland. They have a little bit of womenswear but great menswear—and they also carry a lot of great body products. I’m obsessed with Malin+Goetz, and they carry all of their stuff. The guys that run it are super nice. They are really into chatting with you—it’s a very personalized shopping experience.” (blackbirdballard.com)
Canoe
“Canoe is fantastic. We just bought Hearth ceramics for our house, and we went there and picked them all out. I have my eye on this crazy, fancy mechanical pencil for my boyfriend, and they have some really amazing wood-slice cutting boards. They have a great online store, too.” (canoeonline.net)
SEATTLE
Totokaelo
“Totokaelo has a super clean aesthetic—very modern and white. Last time I was there, the jewelry was hung up on the wall with colored tape—literally just taped straight to the wall. It was really unique. I have a Shabd bag—a tie-dye one with a rope handle—that I bought there.” (totokaelo.com)
Lambs Ear Shoes
“If you want some amazing shoes, this is the place to go. The owner introduced me to LD Tuttle. I haven’t thrown down for a pair yet, but I’ve been obsessed with the line for a while.” (lambsearshoes.com)
Get on our email list to ensure you don’t miss out on Sara’s edition tomorrow—only available here.
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Meet Better Late Than Never
The Portland designer speaks to the joys of making jewelry by hand.
How long has Sara Dudzinsky been making jewelry? “Since I was old enough to use those giant plastic beads,” she says. Granted, it took the designer some twenty-odd years to develop her aesthetic. In high school, she discovered a propensity for metalwork, and after getting her BFA in metals and jewelry from Cleveland Institute of Art—in her hometown—she moved out to Portland, Oregon, with her boyfriend. “We actually grew up two blocks from each other,” she confesses.
For Sara, what makes jewelry-creation her thing is the hands-on intensity of it. “I wavered back and forth between clothes and jewelry for a long time. What brought me to jewelry was the process. I like to sew, but I love the fire,” she explains. She discovered crystals—her material of choice these days—on a thrifting trip when she was sourcing inspiration and other accessory-worthy trinkets. “Even though I might be making the same pair of earrings 50 times over, every one is a little bit different. They all have their own qualities, shapes, and characteristics. It makes it more interesting for me,” Sara says.
Now that she has this rock thing going—creating surprisingly delicate (and charmingly small) pieces from natural stones—she is putting energy toward sourcing some really fantastic crystals directly. “I’ve been trying to find more mines, make more connections,” she explains. This, it seems, will be another way to keep things interesting.
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The Tools that Won Sara Dudzinsky’s Heart
This jeweler’s favorite part of the design process is getting to play with fire.
At first, constructing jewelry was plain boring for Sara Dudzinsky, who makes stunning, petite pieces out of her Portland, Oregon, studio. “When I was in school, I remember taking a production class and hating it—and thinking I could never make the same thing a million times in a row,” she explains. “But that’s what I’m doing, and I love it.” Now, she finds the intensity—and the hard-core tools—tremendously alluring. These are four devices that she can’t wait to play with day in and day out.
Check out the limited-edition earrings she made with this tool set (just for us!) here.
Pliers: “I use them for everything, even just folding bezels around a stone. I’m very adept with pliers. I use two at once a lot—one in each hand.”
Jeweler’s Saw: “That’s used for cutting little pieces out. When I make a ring with a crystal, I form the bezel around the crystal, solder it down onto a flat sheet, and then cut out the band.”
A stack of some of Sara’s rings, one with a dangling crystal.
Hammers: “A lot of my necklaces have a little geometric-shape detail, and I’ve started to do some free-form bangles. For those, I take wire, bend it into a shape with pliers, solder the ends, and hammer them flat. I have some shapes that I’m going off of, but I like each one to be unique.”
Torch and Striker: “I get the tank for my torch from a welder’s supply store, so it looks kind of like a cast-iron helium tank. It has a little regulator on it and a torch chip. So I turn it on, strike the striker, and out comes the flame. That’s probably my favorite part of doing the metal work—the fire. It’s a significant part of the process because almost everything that I do has at least one soldered joint.”
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Sara’s Thriftspiration
One of the Portland jeweler’s top finds: the littlest deer you’ve ever seen.
Before Oregon-based accessory designer Sara Dudzinsky got really into crystals, she was crafting her pieces around found objects. “I came across a little bag of quartz on a thrifting trip, and it’s taken off from there,” she explains. Even though her sourcing has gone a different direction now, she still hunts for knick-knacks (a process she calls “calming and restorative”) that influence her work—and fill her studio.
“My boyfriend got the jeweler sign for me at a thrift store for my birthday—it’s hand-painted. There are a ton of vintage shops in Portland, and he bought this at SMUT.”
“This is my favorite thing right now. It was a geologist’s case, and it looks handmade—like, stapled together. It has 64 drawers, 32 on each side. I got it at a weird antique furniture place that has all sorts of crazy pieces, and it’s perfect for me because I use so many little parts. I’m not the most organized person, but I love to be methodical with my materials, lay everything out.”
“These aren’t thrifted, but I’ve had those crystal pieces forever. I got them when I was seven or eight at the Museum of Natural History. I guess I’ve always been kind of a rock nerd.”
“My collection of tiny deer is kind of out of hand. It started a couple of years ago, right after I moved to Oregon. In my old apartment, I had all of the deer crammed onto the top of this bookshelf—they were out all the time, which drove my boyfriend crazy. So this year they all came out at Christmas, and I have some of them in my studio. These are my current favorites. The baby is the size of my pinkie nail. They’re so tiny it’s ridiculous.”
Sara has created an exclusive pair of crystal earrings for Of a Kind. Buy them right here.
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Sara’s Six Portland Restaurant Picks
This jewelry phenom is as entrenched in the restaurant world as the design one.
Clyde Commons, Sara’s second place of business
What does Sara Dudzinsky do when she isn’t working? She works—as a food runner at one of Portland’s hot-restaurant mainstays, Clyde Common. “I get tunnel vision and stay in the studio all day. I work at the restaurant to get out of the house,” says the jewelry maker. Plus, her very part-time gig makes for good bonding with the boyfriend—he’s a sous chef at another local star, Park Kitchen. “We look at our approaches to our crafts in similar ways. Both of us have a product that we want to be marketable but still be new and exciting,” Sara explains. Here’s where she eats when she’s not working or working.
Le Pigeon
“I’m a sucker for rich, buttery food. I love sweet breads. My favorite place in Portland is La Pigeon. My boyfriend actually worked there for a while.”
(738 E. Burnside St., 503-546-8796; lepigeon.com)
Meat Cheese Bread
“It’s run by a friend of mine, and he’ll make any sandwich into a salad, which is pretty awesome. They have a really great breakfast burrito, and I love the BLB, a bacon, lettuce, and beet sandwich. They use tomatoes in the summertime, but in the winter they switch to roasted beets.”
(1406 SE Stark St., 503-234-1700; meatcheesebread.com)
Clyde Common
“I’ve been there for 2 ½ years. They’ve changed their menu a bunch of times, and I’ve just never gotten sick of their food.”
(1014 SW Stark St., 503-228-3333; clydecommon.com)
Pok Pok
“It’s Southeast Asian and always packed—you have to wait an hour no matter what day of the week. Go at 5p unless you’re a single and can sit at the bar.”
(3226 SE Division St., 503-232-1387; pokpokpdx.com)
Park Kitchen
“My boyfriend is the sous there!”
(422 NW 8th Ave., 503-223-7275; parkkitchen.com)
Broder
“It’s a Swedish place that’s just open for lunch and brunch—9a to 3p. It’s adorable and really Scandinavian—clean lines and teal and yellow stools.”
(2508 SE Clinton St., 503-736-3333; broderpdx.com)
Sara of Better Late Than Never made some awesome earrings just for us! Check them out here.
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Better Late Than Never
How long has Sara Dudzinsky been making jewelry? “Since I was old enough to use those giant plastic beads,” she says. Granted, it took the designer some twenty-odd years to develop her aesthetic. In high school, she discovered a propensity for metalwork, and after getting her BFA in metals and jewelry from Cleveland Institute of Art—in her hometown—she moved out to Portland, Oregon, with her boyfriend. “We actually grew up two blocks from each other,” she confesses.
For Sara, what makes jewelry-creation her thing is the hands-on intensity of it. “I wavered back and forth between clothes and jewelry for a long time. What brought me to jewelry was the process. I like to sew, but I love the fire,” she explains. She discovered crystals—her material of choice these days—on a thrifting trip when she was sourcing inspiration and other accessory-worthy trinkets. “Even though I might be making the same pair of
