Models sported strings of shimmering sea-green buttons, silver wrap-around bracelets and loopy floral pendants at Island Jewels' fashion show on March 13 at Koi Restaurant and Gallery in Kemang.

Designer Shalini Gopalan Menon said before the show that she had used a lot of florals and bright colors because it was coming into Spring in the countries to where the jewelry is exported.

"But you can add a pop of color to your wardrobe whatever the season," she said.

Celebrity-inspired cocktail rings -- slabs of color, encrusted with diamond glitter for maximum bling -- also feature in the Spring 2008 collection. They border on the gauche and are set in 925 Sterling Silver. Shalini said she had no trouble at all convincing young Jakarta women to wear "knockout" rings on a day-to-day basis.

"The bling-bling look is very much in. Cocktail rings are huge. People like them because they attract a lot of attention," she said, adding that her team frequently traveled to fashion weeks like Mercedes Australian Fashion Week and The Hong Kong International Jewelry Fair to keep up with the current trends.

The designer works predominantly with lava crystals which comes in a variety of colors like minty green, midnight black and cobalt blue.

Lava crystals have the liveliness, the sparkle of champagne. Whether the crystal has been cut into droplets or jubes of candy like cufflinks, or is left as shards of silver-grey crystal in silver webs, there is something hypnotic about them.

Shalini is passionate about nature and many of her designs -- rainbow chains, sunrise pendants and waterfall earrings -- have been inspired by the islands of the archipelago.

Island Jewels started six years ago as a rehabilitation project for prisoners on Nusakambangkan prison island.

Shalini said: "The whole project started because someone I knew went to jail. They had a lot of time on their hands. Our whole motivation was to keep the prisoners busy. But we had to think of something they were capable of doing. The name Island Jewels also came to me when I was sitting on Nusakambangkan Island. I am very nostalgic about it."

The jewelry line expanded rapidly and the prison project now runs separately from Island Jewels.

"It was a sort of 'teach them to fish' type of thing", Shalini said.

"We often buy materials from them now. It is only that we needed to employ silversmiths and jewelers with superior techniques to bring up the shine, to bring forth the essential beauty of the crystals."

Shalini wants people to understand that all of the shapes are hand cut and not mass-produced. "Indonesian craftsmen are extremely talented. Everything is hand cut -- whether it is a fish or a flower," she said.

"Basically it derives from lava and the material has been in Indonesia for a very long time. It is not like a man-made glass. It comes from natural materials. I would say it is aligned to rock crystal or quartz."

Another appealing element of Shalini's designs is that they can be mixed and matched, or altered to change the overall effect.

"For instance, you can buy the earrings and hook on the drops and later you can buy other drops and switch them around. Necklaces can be wrapped around and worn as double strands or as single."

She said there had been a history of utilizing lava crystal in jewelry in Indonesia long before Island Jewels came on the scene.

"It was there way before we started. They would make it look like emeralds and diamonds and sapphires. I would say it would have been adopted by the second layer of society, the ones who could not afford the diamonds or who just wanted something prettier and chunkier," she said.

Shalini said: "In the early days we had all these little off stones. So I started stringing them together and that just widely appealed and then snowballed and we got orders from as far as Italy. And we found that people were interested in making a statement. They wanted to be recognized for their jewelry and not just for their clothes. And they wanted to travel, without thinking 'Oh my gosh* What if I should lose this*'" Bling bling*

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