Meet the Artist

🏆 Voted Best of South Carolina — Honorable Mention

Hello! I'm Michelle Trout. I grew up in the Southwest, where turquoise, silver and the wide open sky have a way of getting into your bones. I spent summers deep in Western culture — and for several years I competed in Cowboy Mounted Shooting, riding on horseback in 1800s-era dress with pistols in hand and my heart absolutely full. That world shaped me more than I can say.

Life brought me to the Southeast, and I carried those roots with me — along with a love for the whimsical, the gothic, the ethereal. I never fit neatly into one aesthetic, and I stopped trying a long time ago. I was the kid who wandered between friend groups, at home in all of them and none of them. My jewelry reflects that. It's made for people who don't fit a single mold either.

What I couldn't shake was a frustration with how things are made today. Cheap, disposable, clinical — nothing with soul or story. I missed a world that felt softer and held more wonder. So I turned to the earth itself — to the gemstones God placed in the ground over millions of years — and I learned to set them by hand in fine metals. Every piece is one of a kind. Not as a tagline, but as a fact: the stone can't be replicated, the setting is hand-formed, and I made it myself.

Southern Shores Artistry exists because beautiful things deserve character, and the people who wear them deserve something that holds a little magic.