While some might consider settling down to mean marrying, starting a family or buying a house, for Carley Conemac it meant putting a stop to her decadelong adventure of hopping trains and instead, finding a town to tuck into. In Homer, she found not only a community, but also a passion for silversmithing, which she now shares with others.

Using a traditional style of silversmithing called metal stamping, Conemac designs her own pieces and creates custom work. Making all of her jewelry from raw silver, her earrings, pendants, cuffs and rings are handmade. She also incorporates less traditional gem stones, like fossils, agates and sea glass. She also likes to make items that she describes as more masculine, including lighter cases and money clips.

Conemac’s designs are inspired by the landscape around her as well as the gemstone or item she is setting into the piece she is creating.

“I like to start with a gemstone to set the piece and then go from there,” she said. “Sometimes the stone speaks to me and other times I work up a design based on something I’ve seen on a walk or read about in a book. My ideas come from all over the place, really.”

Conemac said that because she has to make two exactly the same, a pair of earrings may take her anywhere from two to 12 hours, depending on how complicated the design is.

“There’s lots of measuring, soldering and sawing when it comes to earrings,” she said.

Since 2021, Conemac has been selling her work online and locally at Divinitea, The Fringe and various fairs. This summer, she also sold at the Homer Farmers Market. She has also been teaching others the joys of silversmithing, at first hosting monthly classes at Divinitea, including “Introduction to Soldering and Ring Making,” and more recently, a variety of ongoing classes every month at Odin’s Mead out East End Road, including a beginner’s workshop, introducing the art of soldering jewelry to community members who then fabricate their own rings from raw silver sheet and wire.

Conemac keeps her class sizes small, limiting to six people, so that every student gets her time and attention. Through these classes, she has learned just how much she enjoys teaching.

“Being good at metalsmithing and good at teaching are two separate things, so it’s very fun to combine both of those,” she said.

Born in California and raised in Virginia and West Virginia, Conemac left home as a teenager and began traveling, hitchhiking around the country and hopping freight trains, making her way from town to town to do farming jobs and busking. For nearly a decade, she continued to live this way, traveling to 49 states before she was 21 years old.

In 2017, when she was 26 years old, she started feeling like she was getting older and that she wanted to settle down somewhere. She worked a beet harvest in Montana that summer, saved up her money and bought a ticket to Alaska.

“I’d never been to Alaska and I didn’t know anyone, but my friend and I just randomly bought tickets and flew into Anchorage with just our backpacks and our dogs,” Conemac said. “When someone told me about Homer, I bought a car, drove down, stopped in at the laundromat and saw a notice for a house for rent and rented it.”

With a place to live and securing a seasonal job commercial fishing, Conemac — who had been playing with a variety of mediums since a child — began collecting art supplies. When a friend introduced her to metalsmithing, she bought a soldering kit and began teaching herself to make jewelry as a hobby, spending her summer months at sea and doing various jobs around town in the winter.

This hobby became a passion when in 2019, she broke one of her feet, had surgery and had to take a year off from work. Confined to her space, she spent most of her time teaching herself to make jewelry.

“It’s a hard trade to learn on your own, but I read a lot of books and watched a lot of YouTube videos,” she said. “It was a long journey and very fun.”

At the end of the winter, she posted some of her work on social media, sold her first pieces and built a following. Through her networking, she was also gifted silversmithing supplies that had belonged to a silversmith who passed away the year prior.

“That person’s partner reached out to me and asked if I’d like their tools and they ended up giving me everything,” Conemac said. “That was the greatest thing that ever happened to me in my life. That silversmith was very talented and a special part of the Homer community and having their books and tools changed everything for me. With those supplies, I was able to fabricate pieces on a larger scale and with the other silversmith having taught classes and owning multiples of tools, I was inspired to want to teach.”

Conemac said that even before she got into silversmithing, she had been drawn to metal.

“Part of me thinks that my background of traveling on giant metal trains and growing up calling myself a rust punk had a lot to do with my love for metal,” she said. “I’ve worked with other mediums, but metal is the first one I’ve found where I can truly express myself. I’ll be learning this medium for the rest of my life because there’s so much knowledge around it, so I’m constantly challenged and learning.”

Conemac’s greatest joys are sitting in her home studio playing with gemstones, creating designs and soldering as well as teaching. Now a registered teacher, she writes detailed lesson plans that cover every topic she discusses during her workshops and students can take those and study them.

“I love connecting, sharing what I’ve learned and helping my students acquire the tools and materials they need to start their own creative silversmithing journey at home,” she said.

On Nov. 4, Conemac and Odin Mead will host Sip & Solder, a six-hour beginner’s class for ages 21 and older, where students will learn how to create a pair of silver earrings. On Nov. 5 and 12, Conemac will hold two-and-a-half-hour classes on Silversmithing: Intro to Soldering-Ring Making for ages 16 and older. On Nov. 9 and 16, she’ll hold one-hour classes for ages 16 and older on Precious Metal Clay and Mold Making.

Later this winter, she will offer an intermediate class for community members who have taken her other classes or have previous experience. She will also host private silversmithing events at the meadery, including, so far, a birthday party and a private workshop.

Conemac chose Stregas Moon Jewelry as her business name because “Stregas” means witches in Italian and “Witches Moon,” she said, resonated with how she sees her own style.

“My work can be a bit witchy and spooky, and ‘Stregas’ just seemed to fit,” she said.

This fall and winter, community members can find Conemac at the Procrastinator’s Faire, Alice’s Thankful Market, the Nutcracker Faire and the Pratt Museum’s new gift shop which opens soon.

For more information on her workshops and to inquire about custom orders, see her inventory and latest work, or sign up for her monthly newsletters, find her online at stregasmoonjewelry.com, on Instagram @stregas_moon_metal and on Facebook – stregas moon jewelry.

Artist Carley Conemac is photographed at her Homer Farmers Market booth in July 2023. Photo by Syd Paulino

Carley Conemac provides instruction to community members attending her intermediate silversmithing workshop at Divinitea in April 2022. Photo by Serrena Bennet

Hand-fabricated sterling silver hoops with silver clay cow skulls and two-step cut garnet cabochons were created by Homer artist Carley Conemac this past July. Photo provided

A bolo tie is hand-fabricated by Carley Conemac from sterling silver, with two water buffalo face carvings surrounded by branches and a mountainscape. Photo provided