Michelle Huster is a woman of many talents: teaching, playing the violin, identifying graves and making jewelry. 

“I was born in Boulder,” she said. “I used to live on the Front Range before I came here, I went to Niwot High School.” 

After graduating, Huster obtained her degree in music from the University of Colorado in Boulder while starting a family. She taught at a few schools, like in Loveland and most recently at Wamsley Elementary, however, she left about halfway through the semester. 

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“It’s the best thing I’ve done for myself in a long time,” she said. “I’m able to leave my (current) job at the end of the day and I’m able to come back Monday morning and not be stressed out.”

Stress led to Huster having a breakdown where she was having physical symptoms she couldn’t stop. 

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“I went to the doctor and said, ‘there’s something wrong’, and they told me I should take a week off,” Huster said. “I quit in February and then my house burned down a week later.”

Huster lives out in the mountains near Porcupine Creek, southside of Rifle, where she would park and then take a snowmobile in the wintertime back up to the house she and her partner had built out in the forest. 

“That morning, we decided we were going to go to the hot springs, and while we were cooking breakfast, we noticed there was something odd about the stove, so we replaced the battery,” Huster said. “We decided to stay in my apartment in Silt that night and at 12:45 a.m. we got the call.” 

Unfortunately, because the cabin was so far out, firefighters had difficulty getting the engine up to the house and everything was lost. 

“There’s a lot of trauma there, because I’m a violinist,” Huster said. “I had some of my violins up there and there wasn’t anything left of them. That’s been really hard.”

However, Huster has been replacing the destroyed instruments and one of the replacements survived the Chicago Fire in 1871, where the maker hitched it out of the fire on his back in a little boat. 

“I wrote the great-grandson of the maker, who is also still making violins, so it was cool for him to see his great-grandfather’s work,” Huster said. 

The fire was caused by a flexed hose in the stove from over the years. The cabin was made out of carefully picked logs by Huster’s partner and the loss has been devastating in terms of sentimental items like Huster’s violins, antique guns and many other things. 

“We learned a lot,” Huster said. “The big gun safe that’s supposed to be fire-proof is not.” She recommended putting gun safes underground to preserve them from fire. 

While Huster was looking among the wreckage of the fire, looking for a screw or something to salvage from her violins, she found pieces of her jewelry-making tools. 

“I’m digging through and I found this weird little moonstone and it was perfectly fine,” she said. “It looked like the day I got it, so I put it on a necklace, because it survived the fire and so did we.”

Moonstones in particular are Huster’s “thing” and she’ll incorporate tiny rainbow moonstones into her larger necklaces that depict a wire tree over a larger gemstone, like amethyst and the moonstone will represent the moon in that tree scene. 

“I was always the kid that collects rocks and comes home with pockets full of rocks,” Huster said. “When my friend and I were coming from school, we used to see these rocks in people’s rock gardens and we took enough to leave a dent, so our parents were called, asking ‘can we get our rocks back?'” 

Huster makes necklaces, bracelets, rings and earrings out of gemstones and wire, copper or silver, in her free time when she’s not working as a clerk for the town of New Castle or for the Historic Preservation Commission. 

“Right now I’m doing genealogy research and trying to connect a lot of the people who are interred up there (in the cemetery) and I really love that, it’s really rewarding,” Huster said. “We have records that go back to 1889…so we’re just making things digital, more accessible for people.”

Huster’s work is also about identifying graves of people which are unmarked or not marked well and putting their stories together from old newspaper articles from those time periods. 

Huster is a woman well-invested in history, whether it be from her instruments to her job and to her artistic pieces, from the moonstone that survived to the presentation pieces of where her art resides. 

“George (Huster’s partner) makes a lot of them for me. This one is made out of applewood and antlers,” she said, indicating where most of her rings resided on deer antler tips. 

Huster’s work is on display at the Bookcliffs Arts Center in Rifle at 1100 E 16th Street and she has a website to sell her pieces from her business, Mystical Twisted Roots, at http://www.mysticaltwistedroots.com/.