Betty Cooke, who was known for her uniquely designed sculpted jewelry and as the founder of what is now The Store Ltd. in Cross Keys, died Tuesday at her Ruxton home. She was 100. No cause of death was available, according to family members.

“Betty was a national force in design,” said Fred Lazarus IV, former president of the Maryland Institute College of Art. “I think clearly that her legacy as a designer is simply remarkable. She was a modernist and so far ahead of her time.”

Betty Cooke, the daughter of Francis William Cooke, a B & O Railroad clerk and artist, and Katharine Cooke, a singer and a teacher, was born in Baltimore and raised in Howard Park.

After graduating from Western High School, she earned degrees from what is now the Maryland Institute College of Art and a bachelor’s degree in fine arts in 1946 from Johns Hopkins University.

Her interest in art began when as a 10-year-old, she would tag along with her father to Gwynns Falls/Leakin Park where she would set up an easel next to him and paint the world around her.

In the 1940s while a student at MICA, she began designing with silver and brass.

Ms. Cooke learned to work a blowtorch with nozzles of various calibers, a hand drill, a fret saw, pliers and a vise. In a 1951 Baltimore Sun interview, she explained how she saw in silver and brass “an easy rhythmic motion.”

“She’d drive across the country to museum shops showing and selling her work,” Mr. Lazarus said. “She was not only an amazing entrepreneur but an amazing designer.”

While teaching a design and materials course at MICA — which she did for nearly 19 years — she met and fell in love with a student, William O. Steinmetz, whom she married in 1955.

In the 1940s, she purchased an 1830 Tyson Street rowhouse — on the same street her future husband had a rowhouse.

While continuing making and selling her jewelry from her Tyson Street home — which she called The Shop — she and her husband established Cooke & Steinmetz, a firm that designed restaurant interiors and Far Lanes bowling alleys.

“Bill and I used to design for and with architects,” she told The Sun in 1979. “We were freelance designers and consultants. I think in terms of jewelry, but jewelry is also sculpture which could be done on a larger scale.”

Of her jewelry designs, she explained in the 1979 interview, “I like combining fool’s gold, pyrite, a beautiful color — is there such a thing as rich drab? — with topaz and 14 carat gold. I like rich drab with one small diamond.”

She added: “Design’s the most important thing. If you’re a strong designer your style or direction is always clear.”

In 1965, James Rouse, the Columbia developer, invited the couple to move The Shop to the new Village of Cross Keys where they renamed the business The Store Ltd., which has remained in business for the last 59 years later, and where Ms. Cooke worked six days a week creating her unique handmade jewelry that found favor with an audience of “well-heeled patrons,” The Sun observed in 2021.

“She and Bill were inseparable and very supportive of the local art community. They were fixtures at events and always supported them,” Mr. Lazarus said. “It’s just who they were, and what they did for MICA was just incredible.”

In 2019, the Baltimore Museum of Art hosted an exhibit of her work, which was followed two years later, by a retrospective, “Betty Cooke: The Circle and the Line” at the Walters Art Museum.

“When I taught, we used to study what could be done with one straight line,” she said in the exhibit catalog. “I can spend years with a circle.”

In addition to the BMA, Ms. Cooke’s work has been displayed in New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Fine Art in Boston.

She and her husband enjoyed collecting folk art, Mr. Lazarus said.

“She never stopped working and just this spring Betty was telling me that she had to get inventory ready for Christmas,” Mr. Lazarus said.

“She was determined to get to the 100 plateau, and after that, there was no plateau that was quite the same,” he said.

Her husband died in 2019, and their only child, Daniel Cooke, died in 1982.

Plans for services to be held at MICA in September are incomplete.

Ms. Cooke is survived by three nephews; and three nieces.