Meggan Monday: Stone Man and Gem Lady
On this week’s Meggan Monday, we are taking you to Long Beach to introduce you to a lady who knows her jewels and gems!
Sami Taylor, known as the gem lady, has been in business since 2006 and owns The Stone Man and Gem Lady on Jeff Davis Avenue, where she turns fossils, minerals, gems, and precious jewels into works of wearable art.
“Everything from dinosaur jaws, diamond rings, fossils of almost everything, sea fossils and fossils that are millions of years old, some that are extinct. Tomb Jade from the tombs in China. And we make 99% of jewelry ourselves.”
“Well, John use to do lectures at the schools and he’s always went to school with a whole pocket of stones and he’d give 20 kids a stone. So, they kept saying when is the stone man coming back, when is the stone man coming back. So, he became the stone man and then when I met John, I became the gem lady.”
“Mainly because we represented many different areas of the business. I became very involved in making jewelry and using beads and using stones, including walking the beach and finding things on the beach and doing art work with that.”
“We’re hands-on buyers so we would go to very large shows and go have dealers from all over the world to purchase what we had. And then you could see the jewelry we make with good stones. And I just love it became almost addicting. I have some of the biggest, best fossils we’ll find anywhere.”
“Megalodon teeth, shark’s teeth, those are the first two things that most children ask. And the ladies like pearls and a lot of other people only know beads as Turquoise, they don’t know much about the other beads until they come in and they see the variety I have. I must have 4 or 5 hundred different kinds of beads. Everything is something with a purpose. The stones can be rough, ugly, or they can be just gorgeous. And whatever you do with them was what makes them so beautiful. Always been able to do that but the biggest thing that we’ve been able to do is repair pieces of jewelry that have been important in their lives in one way or another whether it be a grandmother’s ring or a graduation piece of jewelry. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have my customers coming in and visiting with me. They’ve been very much a big part of my life for many, many years.”
