…Bead Study
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]
BEAD STUDY NOTES
11/6/09
Dagmar shared her first attempt at creating a Greek Key Pattern chain.
wire as the stringing material, in order to keep the spiral shapes.
She used hard
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 9th, from NOON
to 2pm.
The party is pot luck lunch.
Gift Exchange.
Everyone also needs to bring one gift for our Dirty Santa
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
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 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
4. Discussion 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
Discussion 9/17/09
Vintage interpretations
(in this unit, we don’t want to abstract them; we want to emulate them and borrow many
features from them)
- revival styles
Walid – designer
http://www.couturelab.com/editorial/story-walid.html#1
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 appliqué. I thought you’d like to see some of his pieces.
He gets very “interpretive”, but still creates pieces you would apply the lable “vintage”
to, and NOT necessarily the label “contemporaized.”
“Imperfections” are important; you don’t want your projects to look machine made.
Use Czech r/t Japanese seed beads
Use hand cut beads r/t pressed glass
Use older color palettes
What were the goals of vintage styles?
- appreciation of hand craft
- to be “wealthy” was to be “elegant”
- decadence
- class distinctions
- eccentricity
- demonstrating great “hand” skill
-
recapturing lost treasures
proven style transcending fasion
restore life to forgotten styles
how to be unique in a cookie cutter era
wearing these pieces makes you feel very special because they are always
conversation pieces
mourning, commemoration, fun, imitation of fine jewelry
TASKS
1. Categorize styles
NAME
QUALITIES: colors, ornamentation, sizes, types of jewelry
DESIGN ELEMENTS:
TECHNIQUES:
EXAMPLES:
2. What does it mean for a piece to have a great integrity? To resonate?
Vintage Jewelry collector Carole Tanenbraum
http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/an-interview-with-vintage-costume-jewelrycollector-carole-tanenbaum/
http://www.collectorsweekly.com/costume-jewelry/overview
http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/an-interview-with-fine-jewelry-and-costumejewelry-collector-christie-romero/
What’s attractive about vintage jewelry
Reminds me of people I love who wore it, and now are gone
Romantic
More craftsmanship
Different design
Materials not available or affordable now
Nostalgia
Art nouveau style – not see frequently as remade today
Sweeping curves – drama, movement
Opulence
Decadence
Revive – what does it mean to Revive
Deconstruct it to re-create it in a different medium
Infuse something new into it so it’s attractive
Make it more wearable
- scale, materials, color
taking recognizable pieces of vintage pieces
picked out the parts they like, and re-use those
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 might 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 cetain values, images, and sensibilities. And you add others
more meaningful for your current situation.
Revival vs. Contemporizing
Inspiration from same place, but not necessarily looking like original
Keep the old colors or not?
Yes, no, maybe
If viewer is to appreciate the piece as “vintage”, need to approximate original colors
“old colors” sometimes refers to faded-aged colors seen today r/t original colors
Materials
The new materials may not be as good or the same as the old materials
 Austrian crystal (less lead today; different color palette; different quality and
styles of faceting)
 Lucite vs. plastic; -- inside effects vs. applied surface effects
Prong set vs. glue set stones
Czech vs. Japanese seed beads
Each setting custom made to all stones, rather than using standardized sets and stones
A lot of these pieces are very attractive, whey don’t we see these things all over today?
- very dress-up
- don’t have lot of occasions to wear them
- costly to reproduce today
--- materials
--- amount of hand crafting
Themes of Construction
Order and precision
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.
a Greek key pattern.
Many chains had
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.