Washington at Work is a regular feature that focuses on the people behind area businesses and government.
Jaime Rubini emigrated from his native Peru to America 30 years ago with visions of rowing in competitions throughout the United States.
But as his dreams of triumph on the competitive circuit faded and the imperatives of making a living loomed, Mr. Rubini opened a shop selling imported arts, crafts and jewelry.
Some of his customers began bringing in items that needed repair, introducing him to jewelry making. He enrolled in a yearlong course in the craft and began focusing his business on custom jewelry.
Today, Rubini Fine Jewelry and Repair, located just blocks away from the Potomac riverfront, offers a variety of accessories, including Mr. Rubini's signature line - jewelry with a rowing motif.
He also makes engagement and wedding rings, cuff links, pins, necklaces, bracelets, earrings, money holders and belt buckles based on his own - or a customer's - design.
'This guy came in once with a magazine, showing me the picture of . . . Rolling Stones [guitarist Keith Richards]. You could barely see his ring, but we figured it out and made this one for him,' Mr. Rubini says.
Mr. Rubini works in a back room of the shop filled with molds of pendant, key chain, belt buckle and pin designs. After pouring, the pieces are baked for up to eight hours and then buffed and polished.
The shop is always humming with activity, as Mr. Rubini's wife, Susan; his eldest daughter, Joanna; and his mother, Rachel, work behind the sales counter. A part-time bookkeeper also is employed, and two jewelers share the back room with Mr. Rubini.
The only ones not immersed in either making or selling jewelry are the dogs of the Rubinis' daughter. They rest comfortably on their beds under the jewelers' work tables.
The pooches are mostly left to do as they please, except that occasionally Mrs. Rubini comes to retrieve a plastic bag of beads that Honey, the darker of the sister dogs, has stolen.
The beads are stored along a wall, next to transparent boxes that contain numerous unpolished pieces of various designs, along with silver and gold, and the colorful precious stones Mr. Rubini purchases in New York, Bangkok and Brazil.
Aside from precious stones and metals, machines and unpolished accessories, the back room of the Rubini shop also sports lots of pictures of the family at rowing trips or at competitions where they go to sell their rowing-jewelry line.
Sifting through a thick photo album kept at the shop's counter, one can see the products of Mr. Rubini's work over the years. There is a fancy pin that looks like a bug made from pieces of necklaces with different stones and pearls, a diamond ring and a pair of earrings made from a band cut in half with a thin silver line on each side.
Many of the jeweler's customers are regulars.
He made two wedding bands designed by a couple that married in the late 1970s. Several years later, the wife returned to Mr. Rubini's shop, asking him to make her husband another band to match her own. The couple had been robbed and the husband's band was taken.
Loving the challenge of making something work, Mr. Rubini, 50, even fixes old and damaged kitchen pots and pans.
'Some jewelers would be offended by that, but as long as they come the next day to pick it up, I'll do it,' says the jeweler, who coaches rowing at the local high school his three children attended.
Mr. Rubini also doesn't hesitate to do repairs. 'I get very busy with those,' he says. 'Sometimes we do things people say nobody else would touch. But I like to play around.'
Although he mostly works on making new and repairing old accessories, close to 80 percent of sales at the Rubini shop actually stem from engagement and wedding rings. About half of these shoppers buy the imported bands offered at Rubuni's store. The other half come with specific designs, bring their own stones or have a family heirloom in need of cleaning or restoring.
Prices at the Rubini shop are comparable to those at other jewelry stores. They vary depending on how much time and work is involved.
For instance, a custom ring usually takes 10 to 14 days and costs about $300. But difficult jobs are more, such as two rings that required many tiny diamonds to be set, and were priced at $900.
The weeks leading up to Valentine's Day, says Mr. Rubini, are quite busy. But he's definitely more swamped during the end-of-year holidays and in September.
'I always thought it was April but, no, more people seem to be getting married in September,' says the jeweler.
