By Ann Barnsley  

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, what better time to get to know your local jeweler.   J Morley is the man behind the window at Schubach’s Jewelers in the Twin Peaks Mall.  His company, J Morley Goldsmith, is a full service jeweler and has been located in Schubach’s Jewelers for the past five years, offering everything from repair work to custom orders.

Morley got his start making jewelry at 14 while in high school in Chicago.  He was immediately “hooked on rocks and minerals.”  

After graduating, Morley moved to Boulder and took jewelry classes in a small shop run by Scott Pease.  A year later, Pease hired him to cut stones and do jewelry repair work.  Later, Morley opened his own store,  Silver Griffin Jewelry, where he did repairs, filled custom orders and taught jewelry making classes.  

During the late 1970s, he moved to California doing lighting for concerts, while still creating jewelry on the side.  

In 1980 Morley moved back to Boulder, married and had a beautiful daughter Mellisa, who seems to be following her father’s creative footsteps.  Although he primarily worked in construction, he continued to make jewelry.  “I took as many classes as I could find during this time.  As a matter of fact, I am always taking classes and learning in this trade.  It is an evolutionary thing,” he said  

By the late 80s he was managing the wholesale jewelry company, Aries Artforms.  He went on to manufacture his own line, J Morley Creations at State of the Arts, which later became Art Mart in Boulder.   He eventually moved to Niwot and rented space at Second Avenue and Franklin Street, wholesaling a line of Southwestern Indian jewelry while living in the caboose.  

In 1991, he opened J.R. Morley Jeweler, a fine jewelry store in Cottonwood Shopping Center.  It was a full service shop and that included gold work, stone settings, antique repair and service.  He still traveled to Boulder and Longmont for various jewelry repair jobs and custom orders, ending up first at Gordon Jewelers and then at Schubachs in Twin Peaks Mall.  

Morley is a diamond broker working with top quality diamonds, other precious stones and quality minerals such as platinum.  He also has a wholesale sterling silver line called Dinohide created from fossils of dinosaur eggshells or skin and replicated onto silver.   

He recently sold the line to the Discovery Channel Store, the University of Colorado Museum and the Museum of South Dakota and is working on developing a deal with Universal Studios and the Natural History Museum in Chicago.  

As for the future, Morley hopes to one day open Coyote Ridge Studio, a teaching studio on his 33 acre farm off  of Niwot Road.    

From the sounds of it, J Morley is a good man to know, Valentine’s Day or not.