Tucked away in a corner of Carrie Nunes’s home studio is an interesting black and white photograph of a woman whose back is turned to the camera as she paints. Nunes tells me it’s her grandmother and notes how art runs in the family.

For years, Nunes’s mother, Marianne Leach, ran a dance studio in Nashville, TN. In her retirement Leach took photography classes and now takes pictures of dance performances at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center.

It wasn’t a surprise to her family that Nunes would choose to follow a career in art after graduating from Franklin Road Academy. She started at the University of Tennessee studying dance and eventually made her way to the Appalachian Center for Craft where she studied metalsmithing and jewelry making.

In her 20s, Nunes struck out on her own after working with Nashville designer Margaret Ellis. She quickly focused on a love for making jewelry.

As I look around the studio I’m impressed with how many tools she uses. One in particular is a huge rolling mill from Britain bolted to the floor that’s used to work sheets of metals, sometimes stretching it into her own hand-made wire.

Now in her early 40s, Nunes has added a gemology diploma to her tool kit. With it comes a whole new world of creations she shows me in her home studio near David Lipscomb.

The work is meticulous and detailed. Nunes uses high powered glasses she flips over her face to make sure every detail of her work is perfect. When she works with gems, Nunes uses a microscope to study the gem’s intricate features before setting them in her work.

Tiny is a theme that comes up often in our conversation. Nunes reminds me both her grandmother, mother and great aunt are all tiny women. Nunes’s husband Ted, who stopped by with lunch for his wife, recounts a time he had to pick up her great aunt’s car from the mall.

“She was driving on a stack of telephone books,” he said lovingly as they both laughed. Nunes points to an impressive hunk of furniture embedded with several tiny drawers. It sits below her soldering station and belonged to her great aunt before she passed away. Nunes shows me how she now uses it to store some of the many tools of her craft.

Nunes says she’s always been fascinated with tiny things. She grew up in what she says was the tiniest room in the house. Being small herself was one reason she says she abandoned dance at UT for metal work. It was access to metal working tools at an institution of higher learning that allowed her love of small things to flourish.

Lately, Nunes has been busy making rings as part of a Flickr project called a “ring a day.” There are now over 5,000 photos submitted by the artists who created them. Nunes is selling her creations to benefit a charity that helps craft artists.

Nunes tells me the ring project has been a lot of work that has also opened many new opportunities for her, and she’s excited about some new techniques she’s discovered and new markets for her work.

I’ll share more about Nunes and her work. In the meantime, here’s a peak into Nunes’s Nashville studio from today’s visit.