If you like to pop an all-black outfit with one crazy piece of jewelry, you’ll love the attention-getting rings, earrings, cuffs, brooches and necklaces that Sarah Fox fabricates.

Turning 50 this spring was more than a daylong celebration for mixed-media artist Katherine Mead. To commemorate her milestone birthday, the Lake Oswego, Ore., artist spent the previous year creating 50 new works of art, which she unveiled at a show she called “50 at 50” in the gallery space of a Northwest Portland architecture firm in August.

David Piper is a man of many identities.

By day, as an associate at SRG Partnership Inc. in Portland, the architect juggles the design and building of commercial structures such as a hospital in Honolulu. By evening, he is husband to his architect-wife, a daddy to their 3½-year-old son and, once he heads down to his basement studio, the potter behind David N. Piper Ceramics.

In the mid-1980s, a corporate downsizing at U.S. Bank and a diagnosis that one of her three daughters had Rett Syndrome, a degenerative neurological disorder, led Sally Sellers to leave behind computer programming work and take up quilting contemporary textiles.

Forget finding a hot date via the ads in the back of your favorite magazine: Dean Mook found a profession he’s still crazy about—blacksmithing—while perusing the ads in the back of Mother Earth 35 years ago.

Most couture designers end up with a garment only after months of sketching, pattern-making, fabric-cutting, sewing, fitting and embellishing with ribbons and beads. Not painter Sue Lau. She takes brushes loaded with thinned-down acrylics to canvases topped with archival tissue paper to create her dresses, each of which captures the essence of a place such as Paris or Barcelona.

Luminosity is a hallmark of the pieces that husband-and-wife glass artists Heather and John Fields produce as Fields & Fields Blown Glass in Portland.

Denise Sirchie has a passion for making mosaics, one hand-cut piece at a time. Her sculptures and panels begin with the selection of a form (think vintage mannequin, gazelle-shaped knickknack or Plain Jane frame gleaned from a thrift shop or estate sale) and the gathering of materials—mostly recycled items such as jewelry, china, stained glass, marbles, tile and slingshot pellets—from different shelves in her studio, a former detached garage behind her Multnomah Village-area home that her contractor-husband transformed into a cozy mosaic-making place.

As CJ Rench Design Studio, Chris “CJ” Rench manipulates metal into sculptures with organic lines and shapes (imagine circles, orbs and super-cool squiggles) that he finishes off in either rustic or sleek patinas, or powder-coats in eye-popping colors such as Granny Smith green and School Bus yellow. “You have to have a passion for working with metal to do it because there’s nothing easy about it,” says the 43-year-old, who is also a national sales manager for a couple of companies that make wind-surfing equipment. “Metal doesn’t always perform the way you want it to, but it can take on so many shapes and forms. Luckily, I have a mind that can visualize and draw in 3D. I love getting metal to work with me.”

For embroidery artist Emily Katz, the best kind of art is art you can do with a needle and thread—or a hook and yarn. “I’ve always been interested in tactile arts,” she says. “I went to a Waldorf school, and we learned to knit, crochet and quilt. I did things that were hands-on, and that really taught me to think outside the box when it comes to making art.”