About Me

Who is Chad?

Welcome to my website. My name is Chad Parker , and I have lived in Northern Colorado since 1974. I went through high school in Loveland, and then attended CSU in Fort Collins, receiving my Bachelors of English with a teaching certificate in 1991. Since then, I have been teaching high school at a local alternative education program. In the early 90's, I became interested in rockhounding and minerals, and I started to collect. Naturally, I eventually decided that I needed to do something with these growing piles of interesting mineral specimens. My wife has always been into jewelry, so I naturally started thinking about lapidary and metalsmithing. For several years, I wasn't quite sure how to learn these particular skills. Finally, about 10 years ago, I noticed an ad for a silversmithing class through a local gentleman named Don Norris. As soon as I tried it, I was hooked. I took as many classes as Don could provide, and we became good friends. He still offers classes in the area as well. He is particularly good at casting. If you'd like to contact him for casting classes, email him here.

I continued to hone my talents over the next few years, making custom jewelry for people, and just making it for fun with the occasional sale to help pay for my materials. I bought lapidary tools, and started doing some of this as well. I get a great deal of satisfaction from these pursuits as well as from my teaching, so the next obvious step was to set up classes. With a little advertising, and quite a bit of word of mouth, I have been teaching new classes every 5 weeks since November of 2004. I still make jewelry, and I sell some, but my main focus has become these classes. My wife tends to grab my best work before I can sell it anyway.

My shop is in the Loveland/Fort Collins area, and I have new classes starting every 5 weeks. If you are interested, please email me at:

cvpark@comcast.net
or call me at
(970)215-1020