The hand-cast pendants, earrings and bracelets in the TresMelindas collection each share a story.
In January 2024, while people were setting New Year’s resolutions, jewelry artist Melinda Dennis was preparing to move into a newly constructed studio as her own creative haven.
“It’s a new chapter for me,” says the Colorado-based artist. “It’s a long garage bay with lots of windows and natural light. I’m going to furnish it with everything I love, and I want it to be a place where my talented artist friends can come teach.”
A fervent collector of rustic antiques, Old West relics, vintage Mexican pieces, and unique items that she says “find” her, Dennis is always on the lookout for objects she can not only use for decoration and inspiration, but also her jewelry-making business, TresMelindas.
Vintage Verve
Using equipment from the 1920s and ’30s, Dennis applies centrifugal casting techniques she learned nearly a decade ago to create molds of her favorite relics and then pours molten pewter into the molds to form whimsical pendants, earrings and bracelets.
“It started when I lost my folks,” she says. “I still have the original piece I cast—a feather scarf pin that was my mother’s. I thought it would be so pretty if I could reproduce it as a pendant. My daddy played country music, and I found objects to cast, put words he sang on the back of them, and made pendants to put on my mother’s necklaces. I made necklaces from found objects and words. Now I’m always looking for things I can use—they usually find me.”
She started her business nearly 10 years ago making pendants, and since then, she has added earrings and bracelets, some of which have fun or inspirational words subtly stamped onto them.
“It’s like you’re wearing a little secret sometimes,” she says. “You can share the words on the back if you want, or you don’t have to, but you know they’re there. Words can be powerful, and wearing words nobody else knows you have on is super empowering.”
TresMelindas offers dozens of different types of vintage Western-inspired pendants, including figures of hearts, stars, horses, cacti, cowboys, Native Americans, and buffalo, many of which were made from molds of her mother’s Western collectibles. Customers can create their own “story necklaces,” selecting the pendants that speak to them most and gradually adding them to the beaded necklaces that Dennis sells. They also can purchase one of the necklaces Dennis creates or have her create a custom design.
“Everything I make is generally for me or something I’d want to wear,” Dennis explains. “I lay some pendants out on a tray and make a little diorama and ‘live’ with them and rearrange them until I’m happy with the story they tell. Then I hook them onto a necklace.”
Though her heart is rooted in the Western lifestyle, her designs transcend that niche. Dennis sets up booths at vintage and art markets throughout the West, and she sells directly to customers through social media. Selling directly to her customers allows her to learn their stories and form relationships.
“I sell to generations of women: moms, grandmas and daughters,” she says. “I love making custom pieces that can be passed through generations. I’ve also made matching pieces for horse moms and their horse’s [tack].”
Rural Roots
An old soul with a heart for all things horse, Western and vintage, Dennis was raised near Dallas, Texas; however, she felt most at home on her grandparents’ farm in East Texas and spent weekends and summers there riding horses and enjoying other animals and the open range.
“I was always outside growing up—nature is my church,” she says.
That’s why she and her husband, Mike, who grew up in Oklahoma, raised their two children in the country with the same rural values passed on to them. She also was a 4-H leader for many years.
“We lived in Dallas for a while, and then my husband got a job building a hospital in Nashville, so we moved to a horse farm in Leipers Fork, Tennessee,” Dennis says. “We were supposed to be there for two years, but it turned into 12. Then I thought we were returning to Texas, and I woke up on another horse farm in Bucyrus, Kansas.”
A graduate of Baylor University in Waco, Texas, Dennis worked in corporate marketing communications before pursuing her passion for hand-tinted photography. Her interest in photography started at a young age after seeing a hand-tinted sepia photograph of her parents that they had taken for their fifth anniversary in the 1940s.
“It was the first photo they could afford, and I still have it and look at it every day,” she says. “As a little girl, I remember thinking how beautiful it was, and it made me want to do photography for other people.”
Gifted Artist
Besides creating heirloom photographs and jewelry, Dennis also enjoys painting. She and her husband are also avid fly fishermen. She always knew she saw the world differently than others, but she never understood how she had developed an artistic eye.
“My beloved aunt explained it best to me: She said, ‘Oh baby, your parents were artists,’” says Dennis. “That changed my perspective later in life. My mom, since she was a little girl, could play the piano without reading a note of music, and my dad was a carpenter and an artist with wood, and he sang and played the guitar. Now, I feel like I’ve been given a gift to share.”
Whether it’s a photograph, painting or piece of jewelry, Dennis always finds stories to tell through her work, and she strives to produce pieces of art that everyone can afford. Besides her new studio, she also looks forward to planning trips to showcase the new pieces she’s creating.
“I never thought I’d be doing this at this stage of my life, but I love what I do and am so grateful,” she says. “I love traveling and talking to people, learning about their stories and art. I think you have to travel the West slowly and with an open heart to see the art and stories that are everywhere.”
For more information, visit the Tres Melindas website and @tresmelindasrusticpendants on Instagram.
This article about TresMelindas appeared in the February 2024 issue of Western Life Today magazine. Click here to subscribe!
