Ephemerella Designs, founded in 2004, offers unique artisan jewelry in elegant handcrafted style. Many of the company’s limited edition creations evoke images of nature, flowing water and ephemeral aquatic creatures, all brought to life in beads, fibers, precious metals and semi-precious gemstones. The company’s owner, Margaret Duprey sees this vision nourished by her lifelong love affair with streams, rivers, ocean tides, and the magical worlds and natural cycles they protect and nourish. “Deep down, I think it’s really river water that flows in my veins,” claims Duprey, whose childhood embraced winters beside the lower Delaware River and summers along New Jersey’s Atlantic shore. From an early age, her love of those diverse ecosystems “framed my life, like two sturdy bookends holding a shelf of amazing books”. “Even then, the only times I felt completely absorbed were lying on a dock absolutely still and watching what lived under it, or figuring out at home what I could make next with my father’s tools.” She first pounded and filed fanciful shapes and jewelry at about age eleven, out of heavy aluminum wire she begged from the shelves of her parents’ hardware store. Coincidentally, the first crude aluminum earrings she recalls draping from her ears were crafted in the shape of fish. Today, Duprey works in more grown-up silver and sometimes gold, “but the eagerness and satisfaction are exactly the same. After all these years, I can still feel the old excitement! It takes me right back to where I began!”