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Vintage Car Jewelry: Creation of our Vintage Jewelry | Joyride Jewelry

A rusted, turquoise pickup truck with TEXACO on the door sits in the foreground of a large junkyard filled with old cars and original paint, set in a grassy field with mountains in the background.
A person in a cap is working on the trunk of a vintage blue car with original paint and a rusty exterior in a junkyard, surrounded by other old vehicles and dry grass.
A person wearing a green bandana and gloves uses tools to work on vintage car parts in a workshop, with mountains and blue sky visible through an open door in the background.
A person uses a jeweler’s saw to cut a shape out of a flat piece of metal, perhaps repurposed from vintage car parts, focusing closely on precise work at a wooden workbench.
A person rests their hand, adorned with eye-catching jewelry, on the open door of a vintage mint-green truck. The original paint gleams as the truck’s mirror and window frame a grassy field in the background.

Junkyard day is our favorite. We meander through rows of old cars as tumbleweeds roll by, leading us past Chevys with their seats worn to springs and pickups with weeds growing up through their steering wheels. Eventually, if we’re lucky, we’ll find the chartreuse green shell of a ‘72 Plymouth Roadrunner or the remains of an epic pink ’57 Chrysler New Yorker, fins glinting in the sun. Then we pull out some parts and get to work.

“We love the challenge of working with this material. It is not brand new or flat or shiny or perfect. Mother nature creates a beautiful palette of patinas for us to work with that would be impossible to reproduce.”

--Pyper and Jarrod

The pieces we find dictate our design. Whether we are working with a door, hood, or fender, we always keep the surviving paint intact. Decades of exposure to the elements results in unique patinas that we could never recreate on our own. Our designs highlight the beauty of the original material -- rust, scratches, and all.

Back in the studio, we use cold form fabrication and sheet metal production techniques to hand-build each piece, combining sterling silver with what we’ve salvaged to elevate and honor the automotive metal. We take a bit of history --- rusted, weather-worn steel that still retains the memory of its gleaming glory days -- and turn it into refined jewelry with a decidedly modern aesthetic.