Margaret Östling thought she'd be a painter. She was studying architectural design in Southern Illinois in the 1970s when she wandered into what she calls "an elective metalsmithing class" — the kind of course you take to fill credit requirements, not change your life. But something about heating silver until it glowed, about coaxing metal into shapes that caught light just so, made her forget all about canvases and brushes.
More than four decades later, she's still working with fire and metal, but now from a studio on Commercial Street in Leavenworth, Washington, where the Bavarian-themed storefronts give way to the serious business of the Cascades rising behind them. This isn't tourist jewelry — though plenty of visitors to this mountain town discover her work. These are pieces that have won AGTA Spectrum Awards and De Beers Diamonds International Awards, the kind of recognition that puts you on the map in fine jewelry circles.
Walk through Leavenworth in winter and you'll see why this place shapes the jewelry that comes out of Margaret's studio. The town sits in a valley where the Wenatchee River cuts between snow-heavy peaks, and when you look at her Glacier Peak pendant — named for the volcanic giant that looms to the northwest — you can see those angular ridgelines translated into silver. Her Edelweiss earrings aren't just alpine decoration; they're a response to living where wildflowers push through snowpack every spring.
But Margaret's work reaches beyond the mountains that surround Leavenworth. You'll find Norse runes cast as Standing Stones, each one carrying ancient meanings — "Thor" for strength, "Ehwaz" for partnership. There are Jacobite roses that speak to Scottish heritage, and Waterhorse pieces inspired by Celtic mythology. It's like her studio serves as a crossroads where different cultural traditions meet the specific geography of the North Cascades.
The GIA training shows in the technical execution, but what keeps you looking at these pieces is something harder to quantify. Take her Möbius pendant — mathematically, it's a surface with no beginning or end, but in Margaret's hands, it becomes something you want to trace with your finger. The Moon River tie tack captures the way light moves across water, while her Waterhorse ring suggests something powerful moving just beneath the surface.
""I have always been involved in art and had anticipated a career as a painter, but an elective metalsmithing class... was the spark that ignited my career in Jewelry Arts field.""
This is made-to-order work, which means when you commission a piece from Margaret, you're not just buying jewelry — you're entering into a conversation. She sources her own diamonds and colored gemstones, works by appointment seven days a week, and approaches each piece as if it's the first time she's ever bent silver to her will. After thirty-plus years of national and international design awards, she could probably make these pieces in her sleep, but the work still has that quality of discovery you'd expect from someone who stumbled into her calling.
Leavenworth itself is a study in reinvention — a former logging town that transformed into a Bavarian village to survive economic changes in the 1960s. But Margaret's jewelry doesn't lean into the town's adopted Alpine persona. Instead, her pieces seem to dig deeper, into the geological and cultural layers that existed long before the first lederhosen showed up for Oktoberfest.
You can find her work through appointment at her Commercial Street studio, where the Cascades provide a backdrop that makes her mountain-inspired pieces seem inevitable. But even if you never make it to Leavenworth, wearing one of Margaret's rings or pendants carries something of that place with it — the precision required to survive winters that bury the town, the patience needed to watch snowpack slowly reveal wildflowers, the understanding that the most beautiful things often come from the most unlikely beginnings.
Sometimes the best discoveries happen when you're looking for something else entirely. Margaret found that out in a college metalsmithing class four decades ago, and if you find yourself driving through the Cascade Loop, it might be worth stopping in Leavenworth to see what discoveries are waiting in her studio.
