CENTER FOR BEADWORK & JEWELRY ARTS
BEAD STUDY
DISCUSSION NOTES

The purposes of the group are manifold, including to explore new methods of beading, to experiment with variations on traditional techniques, and to study culture-specific beading techniques.
Bead Study meets the 1st and 3rd Wednesdays of every month.  Anyone may join our group at any time.
You may also register for the BeadStudy group under Yahoo where
summaries of the discussions are sent to group members.  You
may continue the discussions on line on our blog or in the yahoo beadstudy group. Summaries of all discussions and all handouts are archived here for you, as well.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/beadstudy

[Bead Studies Archives]

Dagmar shared her first attempt at creating a Greek Key Pattern chain.    She used hard wire as the stringing material, in order to keep the spiral shapes.

Dagmar agreed to moderate a once a month open session, where people can come together to work on a project each month out of one of the bead magazines.    There would be no fees for this.     This open session would be held on a Saturday afternoon.    Let Warren know if you would be interested in attending.

HOLIDAY PARTY

The date of our bead study group holiday party will be Wednesday, Dec 9^th, from NOON to 2pm.   

The party is pot luck lunch.     Everyone also needs to bring one gift for our Dirty Santa Gift Exchange.

Let Warren know if you will be attending, and what type of food you will be bringing.

ASSIGNMENTS:
1.  Continue experimenting with the GREEK KEY PATTERN CHAIN

2.  Using seed beads and/or delicas, try to recreate the flower pattern in this Miriam Haskel necklace.

What you are seeing in the image are 3 flowers, somewhat overlapping, and serving as a bead cap.     This configuration is surrounding the top and bottom of a 6mm round druk bead.

What we don’t know:
- are the 3 flowers part of a single piece, like in this image below?

- or are the 3 flowers three separate pieces that overlap or interlock?

- or are the 3 flowers in some way a “bead” or a “drop”

You want to create about a 7” long sample, that have the same look/feel as the original vintage piece, where the 3 flowers keep their relative positioning even when the piece is moving, and that is sensitive to the qualities of the color palette in the original piece though your piece doesn’t have to be the same color.

CENTER FOR BEADWORK & JEWELRY ARTS

Bead Studies
Discussion Notes Sept 2009

TOPIC: Vintage Revival

VINTAGE REVIVAL:  Rethinking Costume Jewelry from the 1920's thru 1950's as Bead Weaving Interpretations

One prominent jewelry artist back then was Miriam Haskell.    Diane Fitzgerald has a workshop based on Haskell's designs.  You might check out Diane's website for ideas.  Another artist of the time goes by Juliana Jewelry.

Can we create rules/terms/concepts/strategies for translating design elements in these vintage, costume pieces, into bead weaving terms?

Can we create patterns for bead-weaving interpretations of pieces we like?

Unlike our studies on Contemporizing Traditional Jewelry, here we want to emulate the pieces and borrow their features.  We want to reconstruct the pieces using bead weaving techniques.  We don’t want to remake the pieces in modern terms.  We want to preserve everything that makes them vintage.

In this unit, we will be doing the following:

1. Reviewing books on vintage costume jewelry, and identifying pieces we find very attractive

1. Discussing these pieces in general, as well as possible bead weaving strategies for interpreting them

1. Trying to develop a categorization scheme – A Taxonomy in the social sciences vernacual – to beginto get a stronger handle on design elements, design styles, and design issues underlying these pieces

We want to see if we can get an understanding of color us, ornamentation, sizes, types of jewelry, design elements, techniques

1. Discussion the pieces in terms of design.   What does it mean for a piece to have “Great integrity” and to “resonate”?

1. Discussing how the bead weaving/jewelry design goal of “revival” differs from that of “contemporizing”.  What does it mean to “duplicate, yet not duplicate” a piece?

1. Working on individual projects to do a bead weaving interpretation of a piece of vintage jewelry

Books about costume and vintage jewelry that we are referring to:

1. Best of Costume Jewelry (nancy schiffer)
2. Artistic Luxury: Faberge, tiffany, lalique (Harrison et al)
3. Costume Jewellery: the Jewels of Miriam Haskell (Deanna Farneti Cera)
4. Vintage Style Jewelry (bead & button)
5. Costume Jewelry for Haute Couture (Florence Muller)
6. Art Nouveau Jewelry (Vivienne Becker)
7. Rene Lalique  Exceptional Jewelry (Yvonne brunhammer)
8. Imperishable Beauty (Markowitz and Karlin)
9. American Costume Jewelry (brunialti and brunialti)
10. Verdura (Corbett)
11. Bulgari (triossi and mascetti)
12. The art of Juliana Jewelry (musetti)
13. Miriam Haskell jewelry (Gordon and pamfiloff)

 
DISCUSSION NOTES, 10/7/09 

Today’s task was to begin to categorize vintage jewelry, so that we can then arrange these categories into an overall Taxonomy.     The taxonomy shows the arrangement and interlinkages among categories.

Today we brainstormed about categories which represent characteristics of vintage jewelry.

1. clunky, chunky

2.   Pizazz, glitzy

Jewelry was the pizzaz, and the clothes people wore were plain

3.  Coming off a chain.     There were not durable stringing materials back then.    Many pieces were a chain or series of chains, from which things were dangled, or from which other compositions and collages were engineered

4.  Keeping attention to the neck/face

5.  Dimensionality achieved through layering, and lots of stuff put together at the focal point

6.  Control, symmetry, everything very “placed”

7.  Comfortable with opaque colors

8.  Fancier clasps and more use of clasps as focal points

9.  Different materials used than today

10.  Matching components – earrings/necklace/bracelet – rather than coordinating components

DISCUSSION NOTES, 10/21/09 

We talked a bit about Cynthia Rutledges projects from her workshop last weekend, and in particular, how these related to our earlier discussion about Dimensionality.

One of her 3-D rectangular donut links, was similar to those of Dianes.  But Cynthia used seed beads, instead of delicas, and used 15/0s for the corners (supporting arms) and 11/0s for the fill-in beads.    We felt this made the  piece more rounded, and sexier, less crafty.

In another piece, she did a 3-D circular donut.   The circle shape was missing from the various books we had looked at.    Cynthia, going around each row, shifts the point of increase.    You have to keep shifting the point of increase with each row, and not keep increasing along the linear “supporting arm”.

Today’s discussion focused on vintage jewelry and the use of chains.     Many chains had a Greek key pattern.    

So, homework for next time:

Figure out  1 or more strategies for creating a Greek key pattern, using seed beads, bugle beads, and / or delicas.      The  design challenge is to be able to keep the “key” shape.

You can envision this as a series of links. 

You can envision this as a series of dropped shapes off a line of beads.

You can envision this as squared or rounded or triangle shape.

Some suggestions:

Try using a 2-needle approach, where you begin with the center of the chain, and then work towards either end.

Try using .012” tiger tail as the stringing material.   Tiger tail kinks, so it can keep a shape.

The Greek key pattern is basically a Double-Spiral.  

You can deconstruct the double-spiral, and work one at a time, and then interlock your spirals
Or, you can work both spirals at the same time.

There is actually a Greek key pattern generator online at:

http://gwydir.demon.co.uk/jo/greekkey/index.htm

A Greek key is a decorative border.   There are a surprising number of different versions.  

Some sample shapes above.   There are many, many more.

Unlike our studies on Contemporarizing Traditional Jewelry, here we want to emulate the pieces and borrow their features.   We want to reconstruct the pieces using bead weaving techniques.  We don’t want to remake the pieces in modern terms.   We want to preserve everything that makes them vintage.

In this unit, we will be doing the following:

1.  Reviewing books on vintage costume jewelry, and identifying pieces we find very attractive

2. Discussing these pieces in general, as well as possible bead weaving strategies for interpreting them.

3.  Trying to develop a categorization scheme — A Taxonomy in the social science vernacular — to begin to get a stronger handle on design elements, design styles, and design issues underlying these pieces.

We want to see if we can get an understanding of color use, ornamentation, sizes, types of jewelry, design elements, techniques.

4. Discussing the pieces in terms of design.   What does it mean for a piece to have “great integrity” and to “resonate”?

5. Discussing how the bead weaving/jewelry design goal of  ”revival” differs from that of “contemporizing”.  What does it mean to “duplicate, yet not duplicate” a piece?

6.  Working on individual projects to do a bead weaving interpretation of a piece of vintage jewelry.

Walid is a contemporary jewelry designer I came across while researching materials for our new study unit.   He’s very into the interpreting of vintage approach, using bead embroidery, beaded fringe, lace applique.    I thought you’d like to see some of his pieces.     He gets very “interpretive”, but still creates pieces you would apply the label “vintage” to, and NOT necessarily the label “contemporized.”     

Our current study unit provides a good discussion foil in reference to our unit on Contemporarized Traditional Jewelry we did a couple years ago.

Historically, people wore jewelry for many reasons.    These included mourning, commemoration, fun, and imitating fine jewelry.

What were the goals of vintage styles?
- appreciation of hand craft
- to be “wealthy” was to be “elegant”
- decadence
- class distinctions
- eccentricy

People today are attracted to vintage pieces, because these pieces demonstrated great “hand” skill.    Working in vintage styles feels a lot like recapturing lost treasures.    These proven vintage styles seem to transcend fashion.   Wearing vintage jewelry always makes the wearer feel very special because these are always conversation pieces.

So, here were are trying to restore life to forgotten styles.    We want to try to be unique in a cookie cutter era.  

When interpreting vintage pieces, it is important to understand the materials, and their contribution to the success of the piece.    You would probably want to use Czech seed beads, rather than Japanese, because the Czech seed beads are more irregular.   They would convey a more hand-done, rather than machine-done, sensibility to your piece.   You might rely on hand-cut beads rather than pressed glass, and older color palettes, rather than new ones, for similar reasons.

When interpreting vintage styles, it is also important to understand the meaning of “revival”.    What we are doing is really reviving styles of the past by reinterpreting them, not just in terms of bead weaving, but with recognition about what will look appealing today.     In this case, it is useful to look at some of the literature both on jewelry revivals, as well as architectural revivals, and see what we kind find about how some revivals were seen as successful, and others not.  

It’s not sufficient to duplicate an old piece.   Compare the pyramids of Egypt to the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas.    Very similar, yet different.    If you were visiting the pyramids in Egypt, you’d bring with you one set of expectations.    And these expectations would be different, if you then visited this pyramid reconstruction/revival in Las Vegas.   

Often, the main change you bring to a revival is a change of construction materials — new types of beads, stringing materials, closures.   It’s a “Look what I can do – better, faster, cheaper!”     Other changes you might bring, would be to adapt one use for another — an old brooch for a new belt buckle or pendant drop.  

In revivals, you preserve certain values, images, and sensibilities.   And you add others more meaningful for your current situation.

Some links of interest:

http://www.couturelab.com/editorial/story-walid.heml#1

http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/an-interview-with-vintage-costume-jewelry-collector-carole-tanenbaum/

http://www.collectorsweekly.com/costume-jewelry/overview

http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/an-interview-with-fine-jewelry-and-costume-jewelry-collector-christie-romero/