Jude Jewellery Is a Labour of Love from Muskoka to Toronto

Judy Carter is a jeweller, a ceramist and a textile artist. She’s also a boutique owner (L’Eau Muskoka) and the founder of the jewellery and clay works brand Jude. But “entrepreneur”? That was accidental.

“I’m just a maker,” says Carter, who has long created art for art’s sake—not sales. “I put out what I love, and I create objects that I hope other people find and appreciate and discover on their own. I don’t push anything on anyone,” she says. Carter also creates connections through her work. “I like resonating with people, and the ones who do love my stuff, we end up becoming great friends.”

In our conversation, I lose count of the different customers-turned-friends that Carter mentions and the special moments they’ve shared, like the client’s mother who covertly purchased the custom fish necklace that her daughter had ordered for her 60th birthday. “It’s relationship-building, but it’s also that I’ve made something that’s important to me that is becoming important to other people,” says Carter. I can see why people find her effortless to connect with—she’s generous and unguarded, kind and funny, and speaks in the way that authentic people do (“I’m not insecure anymore. I turned 60 this year. I don’t give a fuck,” she says). Carter also readily shares her own origin story and how the formative experience of losing her mother at 14 influences her and the meaningful connections she makes. “I lost my mom, so I gravitate to everybody’s mom.”

It was her mom (or, more specifically, a symbol related to her mom—a single hand-drawn flower) that became the inspiration for Jude. “I had done this tiny drawing for my mom that was a flower and a little note. And I unfolded it and I pinned it in my studio, and I’ve had it there forever,” says Carter. When she was having chats about turning the hand-made jewellery that she’d been selling to private clients into a brand, she met with collaborator Georgina McMichen who sent a photo of the flower to Jude’s future art director, Niki Saint Angelo, and photographer, Kayla Rocca. “I almost cried when they said, ‘Well, this is your logo.’”

Jude officially launched in spring 2024. “I needed help refining, refocusing, creating collections and just organizing my creative brain,” she says. “And that’s what they did with Jude.”

The flower became not only Jude’s logo, but a collection of jewellery including a ring and charm necklace. The jewels, which are handcrafted in Toronto using fair-wage practices, are like talismans of Carter’s own healing. “Art has been my therapy,” she says.

Photo by Kayla Rocca

Photo by Kayla Rocca

Photo by Kayla Rocca

There’s a subtle nautical influence in Jude’s collections, like the aforementioned fish charm and a reimagined mariner link that outfits the “Wake” assortment, no doubt a product of Carter’s “cottager” upbringing. She grew up in Ontario’s Sauble Beach and calls herself a “summer girl,” which is just as well because her family has had a cottage in the Muskoka region for nearly 22 years where she has spent many summers with her husband and four children. But while she’s a happy cottager, she’s not one to dilly dally. “When my kids started working in Muskoka, I thought, you know what? I can’t sit on the dock. I needed an activity.” A woman saw Carter’s jewellery and suggested they open a store. They tried a 12-day pop-up and Carter was hooked. So were her customers. “It was this organic validation that what I was making was what people wanted. And I, as an artist, just create it every day,” says Carter.

10 years later, L’Eau occupies a permanent space in the Duke building, a boathouse, in Port Carling. There, Carter sells jewellery and one-of-a-kind flannel shirts, beloved by locals, among other treasures. She also hosts pop-ups with other burgeoning Canadian brands, like Rholend whose classic marinières looked right at home on the boat slip.

Photo by Kayla Rocca

 

Photo by Kayla Rocca

“I had someone else helping motivate me to do it. I don’t know if I would have had the guts to do it on my own,” Carter says of starting L’Eau. “I had that one launch, and then it validated it and I was like—excuse my French—fuck it, I can do this.”

And she continues to do it. Carter’s excited and a little nervous to try another pop-up, this time in Toronto’s Summerhill neighborhood, taking over a “sliver of 200 square feet” in The Lobby. “This tiny space is so my jam. I can’t do big because I want to fill it with my stuff,” says Carter of the temporary retail location that will showcase her one-of-a-kind pieces from September 2025 to February 2026. “Listen, we’ve got enough crap in our lives. If you’re going to buy something, buy something different and unique that you can have forever.”

SHARE