Teresa Kiplinger’s recent Instagram post, titled “How It Started,” showed the first piece that the American jeweler ever made: a rustic silver ring crudely stamped with the word “gray,” the four capital letters spaced a little unevenly along the band.

The “How It’s Going” video that followed showed jewelry depicting extraordinarily detailed images and scenes: swallows pierced with arrows, cows swept up in a tornado, an eye in the sky watching over an apocalyptic scene and fragments of original poetry, all carved, etched, engraved, enameled or sculpted.

But she notes that has not been her life’s work. “Jewelry for me has been a second act,” said Ms. Kiplinger, 56, who described herself as a career graphic designer. “I came to it in midlife when I was going through a divorce, and just looking at something to do with my hands to keep busy.”

In 2013, classes at a local arts center in Cleveland taught her to saw and solder. “I was learning those very basic skills, but I really caught the jewelry-making bug and wanted to keep going,” Ms. Kiplinger said. “But I didn’t get serious about it until 2015 when I lost my teenaged stepson, who took his own life. That grief process for me was so intense, I just threw it all into my fledgling metal work.”

Then she discovered that the Cleveland Institute of Art offered night classes in jewelry and metals: “They were kind of intense — eight weeks long, three hours a week, all in one go. The department was incredibly well equipped. And the people that were teaching those night classes were world-class caliber metalsmiths and goldsmiths.”