She Has Spent 40 Years Cutting Amethyst by Hand in a Norwegian Fjord Village. This Winter, She Is Closing Her Workshop for Good.
Sigrid Halvorsen never advertised. She never needed to. But at 71, with no apprentice and hands that no longer cooperate, she has made her final batch of protection rings — and decided to let them go to strangers for the first time.
Sigrid Halvorsen, 71, outside her workshop in Jondal, Hardanger. She has worked with Norwegian amethyst since 1984. (Photo: Nordic Heritage)
A Workshop at the End of the Road
Jondal sits at the southern edge of the Hardangerfjord, population 1,100, where the road narrows and the mountain rises sharply behind the last row of houses.
It is here, in a converted boathouse that smells of mineral dust and wood smoke, that Sigrid Halvorsen has been cutting and setting Norwegian amethyst since 1984.
She was profiled in Hardanger Folkeblad in 2011 as one of the region's last working crystal artisans — and at 71, her hands have developed a tremor she can no longer ignore.
"I don't make beautiful things," she told me, turning a rough violet stone toward the window light. "I make things that hold something. That's what the women who find me are looking for."
Rough Norwegian amethyst before cutting. Sigrid selects each stone by hand from a supplier in Iveland, southern Norway.
What Her Rings Are Really For
Sigrid's clients have never been collectors or fashionable women.
They are women who say everything feels so overwhelming lately — who wake at 3 a.m. with a tightness they can't name, who feel the world pressing in and have stopped trusting pharmaceuticals to quiet it.
The ring becomes a daily ritual: you put it on in the morning and you choose, deliberately, to carry something steady with you.
"They don't want something pretty. They want something real. Something that says: I am protecting myself today."
— Sigrid Halvorsen
Each ring is priced as Sigrid has always priced her work — fairly, for what forty years of handcraft is worth.
Sigrid's finished amethyst protection rings, each numbered and wrapped in linen before shipping. This is her final batch.
The Final Batch
Sigrid works in small batches of 50 to 60 rings — always has. This is her last.
The amethyst is sourced from Iveland in southern Norway, cut in her Jondal workshop, and set by hand into bands she shapes herself.
There is no apprentice. There is no next generation. When these are gone, the workshop closes and the boathouse goes back to her nephew.
She asked me not to make it dramatic. "It's just a woman finishing her work," she said. But when she held up the last ring she'd completed that morning — a deep violet stone, slightly imperfect, warm from her hands — it was difficult not to feel the weight of an ending.
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What Women Are Saying
Bought it after my second panic attack in the supermarket in March.
I put it on every morning now before I leave the house. That's it. That's the whole review.
I don't know if it's the amethyst or just the ritual of putting it on, but I've slept through the night four times this week for the first time since my divorce was finalised in January.
The stone has a tiny inclusion on one side — you can tell it wasn't cut by a machine. That's exactly what I wanted.
My daughter thinks I'm being naive. But she hasn't sat in a doctor's office being told to try yet another SSRI that makes her feel like cotton wool.
This ring is mine. I chose it. I wear it on my right hand and I touch it when the noise gets loud. That matters to me more than anyone's opinion.
I ordered two — one for me and one for my sister who just moved her mother-in-law into her home in Cologne and has been falling apart quietly for months.
She called me crying when she opened it. Not because of the ring. Because someone had thought of her.