Tag: artstarphilly

Meet New ASCB Vendor Samantha Skelton!

Samantha Skelton Jewelry Design is a one-woman jewelry machine located in Fairview Pennsylvania. I design, create, market and sell all of the work featured in my jewelry collection; however I wasn’t always interested in jewelry. My collection has grown from my love of metal, the form of each element in this collection has been directly influenced by industrial sculptures which I both studied and created.

I studied both graphic design and metalsmithing in undergrad at Edinboro University, choosing to follow metalsmithing into graduate school at Miami University, I focused on large scale copper sculptures. The sculptures I created had an industrial aesthetic and a sense of balance and symmetry, all hand forged and kinetic. Along side my sculptures I found myself making smaller sculptural jewelry, almost as a sketch for larger pieces. It allowed me to play with form in a much faster and more direct way.

Choosing to pursue jewelry full time following graduate school has allowed me to continue connecting form with function. My sculpture and jewelry continue to reflect each other;
I want the wearer to feel the visual impact of the jewelry without being overwhelmed by the physical and visual weight of the metal.

Along with making jewelry and traveling for shows and exhibitions I also teach jewelry workshops at craft schools and universities both locally and internationally.

Visit Samantha Skelton Jewelry in Booth #62 at our Art Star Craft Bazaar on May 9th + 10th and visit her online at http://www.samanthaskelton.com/

May 2, 2015
Meet New ASCB Vendor, Emiko Shinozaki!

After a lifetime of playing and teaching, I put down my violin for the last time in 2006. I felt I was finished with the musical chapter of my life, but I had always made a living working with my hands. I felt a need to explore what I could do with them next.

An immediate change in life ensued—A program to Italy to study fashion design through Fashion Institute of Technology, Accessories and Jewelry classes upon my return…

It wasn’t until I started working with brass, silver, fire, hammer, file and wax that the instruments of my future began coming to life before my eyes. I had transitioned from the ephemera of musical performance to the permanence of metals, and it was intoxicating. I could hold my creations in my hands. I could wear what I imagined. I was in love again.

Architecture, music as math, chemistry, and symmetry–all my old flames– inexorably find their way into my work. I spend hours soldering and chasing flux through the narrow channels between my hexagons. Days fly by as I work out the kinks of an intricate piece of casting. Every method has its advantages and demands. To cast or not to cast? Precision soldering and cleanup versus casting and yet more cleanup?

Doing things the hard way has its rewards. I handcraft each and every piece of jewelry myself for Emiko Shinozaki Jewelry and I don’t do e-commerce. Why? Because I want each piece to be unique, and I enjoy meeting the people who will ultimately wear my pieces. What that means is that I don’t really have a complete ’system ’ in place for manufacture or distribution. The exciting part is that I’m still learning with each piece I make and every client I come in contact with. I continue my tradition of teaching and learning, this time with family and colleagues, as it’s the best way I know how to enjoy life.

I have an unending attraction to the physical changes that brass undergoes when thousands of degrees hit it. My necklace creations have intrinsic “torch marks” that deepen with age, lending depth and 3-dimensionality to an otherwise humble material. One of my necklaces can have upwards of 100 solder connections, sometimes less, sometimes more. As I’ve expanded my offerings, I’ve found the best 18K gold-platers in NYC and learned to make molds & cast silver with the lost-wax method. Each silver or brass Alt-triangle bracelet is hand formed, filed and finished, taking many careful hours from start to finish.

There are no easy answers but, so far, keeping things fresh makes me very happy. Every method has its advantages and difficulties, but the end result is always gratifying. Mistakes are humbling, yet I’ve also come to appreciate these impromptu lessons. I think I was a pretty good violin teacher… I sometimes see an old student interviewed on TV, image impossibly large on the Times Square Jumbotron…

These days I look at my hands and wonder at what jewelry-making has yet to teach me.

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Visit Emiko Shinozaki and her incredible line of jewelry at the Spring Art Star Craft Bazaar (booth # ) on May 9th and 10th at Penn’s Landing Great Plaza. http://emikoshinozaki.com/

April 29, 2015
Meet New ASCB Vendor, Julia Walther!

Well hello there! I’m Julia Walther and I make pottery in Washington, DC.

My journey with pottery began nearly six years ago during my senior year of college when my ceramics professor told us that clay can do anything, you just have to ask it at the right time. That mix of constraints and possibilities is a large part of why I’m so in love with ceramics.

I throw almost all of my work on the wheel using a porcelaneous stoneware that’s a beautiful creamy color when fired. I then spend most of my time decorating those pieces with slips and colored underglazes and carving back through the layers to reveal the bare clay underneath. In the midst of those decorative choices, I’m constantly surprised by threads of ideas that can lead my work down completely new paths.

The cacti decorations have come out of my appreciation of papercutting, and other folk crafts that use abstracted shapes to convey stories and show evidence of the human hand. I also really enjoy carving out the spikes!

After the glaze firing, I’ll choose a few pieces to which I’ll apply metallic luster accents and do another firing specifically for that. So your pot may have had a trial by fire three times before it ends up in your hands.

I work alongside about twenty artists working at Red Dirt Studio, a repurposed firehouse just outside Washington, DC. I love the community we’ve established through weekly seminar meetings and by sharing the building. It’s easy to accidentally isolate yourself as an artist, so I’m glad to have this flow of interesting people around my studio space.

At the same time, this is also the first instance in my career where I’ve had freedom to call nearly all the shots. I want to spend the precious time I have in the studio actually making work and taking care of my body to prevent injuries from overwork. In the last year, that has meant switching to a commercially produced pre-mixed clay, and changing the firing temperature of my work so I can use electric kilns, which tend to be more compatible with an urban environment. Additionally, for the past three years I’ve been throwing standing up, which will hopefully prevent future back issues related to sitting and leaning forward (the worst possible position for your back!).

Pots are special because they can be both a sculpture and a canvas. I’ve found a lot of joy in scribbling on the surfaces of my pots, freezing the movement of a hand in time. I’m excited about creating those juicy points of interest that ask you to turn the pot in your hands to soak up the details while you eat your meal or admire your flowers or engage with the piece in any other way. The last step of making pottery is getting it into the hands of the user, and that’s where a new adventure begins.

This will be my first year at the Art Star Craft Bazaar, and I’m so looking forward to the show! I’d love it if you stopped on by Booth #59 and said hello.

April 28, 2015
Meet ASCB Vendor Sammi Nguyen of Group Hug Quilts

I’m Sammi Nguyen, the hands and brains of a little operation called Group Hug Quilts. My working process is not always the most photogenic, what with piles of fabric scraps towering ever higher around me and loose threads always getting caught in my hair and stuck to my socks, but I’ve cleaned up my act for a few photos to show you how I make a baby quilt.

For my baby quilts, I most often take my inspiration from animals. I sketch critters in my sketchbook, until I alight on one in just the right attitude for the quilt of the moment. (The rest of this post shows me making an elephant quilt, but this cat sketch was nicer than the elephant sketch.)

My studio is filled with overflowing shelves of fabric, which I source from all four corners of the earth, but especially from New York’s fabric district, which is a short trip by subway from where I live and work in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Fabrics are an additional source of inspiration, whether they are solid or patterned, new or vintage. I work almost exclusively with natural fibers like linen, silk, denim, and cotton, with the exception of the occasional too-intriguing-to-pass-up piece of vintage polyester.

After I have chosen a charming member of the animal kingdom, I comb through my fabrics until I settle on a basic color scheme and textures. For this elephant quilt, I chose a muted orange linen for the quilt top and an oatmeal linen for the back and border, feeling that they suggested a dusty savannah environment that would be a suitable home for a leathery pachyderm.

The subtlety of an animal’s shape makes a huge difference to the finished piece, and it often takes a while to get the drawing of the quilt’s subject just right, even if it is a fairly simple silhouette. From the finished drawing, I make pattern pieces out of tracing paper and trace and cut each piece individually, which leads to a lot of subtle variation from quilt to quilt.

While I usually start with a picture in my head and a small thumbnail sketch on paper, each piece really takes shape directly in fabric. This allows me to experiment with the composition of the quilt top and see things closer to how they will look in finished form. During this part of the process, there is a lot of cutting, arranging, pinning, adding bits that don’t work to the scrap bin, resizing, shifting, and more cutting, rearranging, and pinning. It always creates a glorious mess on my studio floor.

Once the composition of the quilt top is finalized, it’s time to sew all the pieces together. I still do all of my sewing on the Viking sewing machine my parents so generously gave to their wannabe fashion designer daughter on her twelfth birthday. This machine is a workhorse, and hasn’t let me down yet, despite all the weird, bulky piles of fabric I send under its needle.

For all of my pictorial pieces, I use a satin stitch, a heavy back and forth stitch that traps and sews down the raw edges of each piece of fabric and adds an important design element in the form of colored outlines. When I first started sewing this way, my work was painfully slow and pretty clunky, with lots of missed stitches and bunched fabrics, but after many years of practice, my stitch work has gotten finer and finer. The technique allows me to forego traditional piecing and applique styles for a more spontaneous collage-like approach to image-making.

When a quilt top is finished, I sandwich it with cotton batting and a solid piece of fabric for backing. To join all three layers together, I quilt freehand on my industrial quilting machine, which lets me move fabric freely underneath the needle, kind of like drawing but in reverse. Being a free-spirited lady, I don’t draw my quilting patterns beforehand; I choose a simple motif, like a flower or a star, and just start sewing, creating a satisfying but not too uniform quilted texture. After quilting, I finish the edges, trim off extra threads, and hand-stitch my initials in the corner.

I know you can’t see the finished quilt very well in this picture, but you can see my beautiful baby nephew enjoying it, and I figured including it in this post wouldn’t hurt my chances of luring you to come see me at Booth #17 at the Bazaar.

April 24, 2015
Meet ASCB Vendor Faryn Davis of Fernworks

Hello my name is Faryn and my little biz is called Fernworks. I grew up on a farm in western North Carolina and I spent many afternoons there collecting little odds and ends that I found on our land like bird nests, feathers, interesting clumps of dirt, moss, leaves, bones, fur, twigs, bugs, and other tiny things. I continue that tradition of collecting and gathering in my paintings and line of resin jewelry today.

My mixed media paintings and jewelry combine hand painted scenes and found natural ephemera into layers of polished resin. Each piece is painted with toothpicks and tiny brushes, embedded in multiple layers of resin, then cut and polished into delicate, dreamlike 3-D landscapes populated by plants, birds, bears, foxes and other woodland creatures.

My studio is a modified 8’x8’ garden hut in our backyard. This is where I paint, pour resin, and store all my many boxes and jars of found objects.

Here are a few pics of me making some new resin rings. I embed little found objects or tiny hand painted scenes into silver settings and then layer resin on top. I then polish and sand each piece by hand on my tabletop sander. (A really dusty, messy process.)

You can find me and my creations at galleries, shops, and craft shows all over the US. I’m always on the go. I recently returned to live in Asheville, NC with my husband and 5 year old son after an 8 year hiatus in the Pacific Northwest.

This is my first time showing at the Art Star Craft Bazaar and I’m so excited! I’ll have tons of new necklaces, earrings, rings, cufflinks, little paintings and more! Please come say hi at booth #30.

April 22, 2015
Meet ASCB Vendors: Tigerlillyshop and Dreadnought Workshop

Hi, we are Allison and Brett, the artists behind Tigerlillyshop and Dreadnought Workshop.

Double Maple Seed Necklace by Tigerlillyshop

We met in college at MICA, he was a painting major and I was a sculpture major. We have always been studio artists. After our early careers in mural painting and upholstery, we decided to narrow our scope and put all of our efforts into a creative business. Most of our jewelry skills are self taught. With our creative talents and drive, we thought we could make a sustainable handmade life as studio artists in Baltimore City.

Dreadnought Workshop Money Clips

So here we are 10 years after starting my Etsy shop! Our lines have evolved and changed with our interests but have always remained true to our hand. I started out with custom plastic rings, developed the kimono button jewelry, then the botanical metalwork and later Brett launched the men’s accessory line, it debuted in 2010. Shoppers can still see us at select regional retail shows, but mostly we make our living wholesaling our men’s and women’s jewelry. You can find us in the studio every day filling orders and shipping all over the country. We are a growing business and hope to be for a long time.

Hydrangea Petal Earrings by Tigerlillyshop

My sister Maria Fomich and I developed the Tigerlillyshop Botanical line together. Since 2009 she has been part of this crazy train ride making her own metalwork and helping spread the word about our family business. Last year she opened a beautiful retail brick & mortar in New Orleans to showcase her own handmade art jewelry. In her Adorn & Conquer Gallery you will find our Tigerlillyshop & Dreadnought lines, and a curated selection of only the best handmade gifts. We are proud to be living the handmade life, advocating for and supporting artists in our larger indie family out there!

About Tigerlillyshop’s Botanical Collection: Allison collects nature specimen to press into metal for one of a kind jewelry. She also creates a cast jewelry collection of her best finds: acorns, twigs, maple seeds, etc.

About Dreadnought Workshop: Brett is inspired by the city, American history, and the things he experiences living in an urban setting. Brett’s new line of belt buckles, tie clips, and cufflinks are made using various metal fabricating and casting techniques which he has learned through studio exploration.
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Thanks to Allison + Brett for sharing their story with us today! Please visit them at the Art Star Craft Bazaar on May 9th + 10th in booth #104 at Penn’s Landing Great Plaza. You can also find them here: Website, Twitter, and Facebook.

April 21, 2015
Make This: Fabric Storage Bins

by Christie Sommers

I have way too many “things” in little piles all over my workspace. It was time to do a little organizing so I made some storage bins and bowls in various sizes to store loose buttons, bobbins and more. They have really brightened up the place so I’d like to share them with you:)

You will need:

-a pencil compass
-scrap paper
-fabric (one outer and one liner)
-fusible interfacing (you want something very rigid, I recommend Pellon Decor Bond Fusible)
-an iron/ironing board
-a sewing machine
-scissors
-ruler

You will need to draft up a little pattern for this one. I made a bin that was 6.5″ in diameter and 4.5″ high. To figure out how long to cut your rectangular pieces you will need to break out the calculator… or your brain. To find the circumference of your base, multiply the diameter by 3.14. The circumference will be the length of your rectangular sides.
In my case: 6.5″ diameter x 3.14= 20.14 ….
Use this calculation to make your bin in any size.

OR….

You can just use my dimensions and make the same sized bin.

Cut:
(3) rectangles: 21″ long by 5″ high (1) liner, (1) outer, (1) interfacing
(3) circles with 3.25″ radius (1) liner, (1) outer, (1) interfacing

You will iron on the interfacing to the backside of the outer fabric.
Take the shiny adhesive side of the interfacing and line it up to the back of your outer fabric.
Iron on holding firmly for 6 seconds to establish a good bond.
Do the same for the circular outer fabric.

Now you will sew the side wall (rectangular piece) to the base (circular) for both the liner and the outer fabric.

Pin as shown.

Straight stitch the liner wall to the liner base

Do the same for the outer wall and base making sure to place the fabric “right” sides together, right side being the printed side that you want to see on the outside when the bin is done.

Line up your two ends of the rectangular piece and stitch up the side wall. Trim

You should have two pieces now (liner and outer) that look like this….

Cut into the seam allowance around the base so that the basket sits evenly when assembled. Take care to not cut into your stitching.

Turn the liner inside out and fit (right sides together) into the outer piece.

Line up your seams and pin all the way around

Sew all the way around leaving a small section about 1.5″ unsewn. You will turn the whole bin right side out through this hole.

When you turn it right side out, use your iron to get all of your seams looking nice and clean.
I liked how it looked with a little of the liner as a trim at the top.

Top stitch all the way around and be sure to carefully seal the opening with your top stitch.

Toss in some sewing notions, or whatever bits you need to wrangle and enjoy!

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Christie Sommers is the designer and maker behind West Oak Design. She handcrafts small batch and one of a kind goods for home, women, and kids in her Wyndmoor, Pa studio.www.westoakdesign.com

April 18, 2015
Meet New ASCB Vendor Daniel Knoll and His Company, My Audio Tree

80% of the worlds forests are already gone. Audio Tree is trying to change that by planting a tree for every product sold. “Play One! Plant One!”

Audio Tree founder Daniel Knoll creates handmade wood products for smartphones and tablets, most notably the signature Iphone acoustic amplifier/docking station. He has over 15 years of woodworking and sound engineering experience which led to the development of Audio Tree LLC.

These speakers have been tested in a professional recording studio and proven to double the sound of your phone’s speaker using “passive amplification” meaning there are no electronics involved. Some have been designed to allow you to charge your phone by running your own charger through the speaker.

Hand selecting exotic woods, and tone-woods, carefully monitoring the moisture content and density are just some of the examples of the attention to detail that is put into every piece. Daniel uses age-old woodworking techniques along with modern day trade secrets. He has even had to have custom made tools in order to create some of his designs.

For the first time Audio Tree will be at the Art Star Craft Bazaar early next month! Stop by the booth (#13) to see these pieces in person and find out more about Audio Tree and “Play One! Plant One!” You can also visit www.myaudiotree.com if you just can’t wait to see more!

April 17, 2015
Meet New Art Star Craft Bazaar Vendor Jon Wye

While I write this blog post from my cozy workshop in Washington, DC I sip from a disappointing cup of coffee. Do not use a Keurig coffee maker for anything but coffee. They sell all these fancy coffee packs to use with the machine but they are merely apparatuses to separate you from your money. How the hell am I supposed to get my day started with coffee that a robot would barely analyze as palatable. But I am cheap so I will suffer through the liquefied cardboard.

My name is Jon Wye and since 2004 I’ve been making a bunch of cool shiz, but mostly known for belts. Many years ago I developed a process for embedding images in leather, which is then turned into belts, guitar straps, camera straps, dog collars, wallets, etc. I also design some t-shirts. The great majority of our production is split between Jeff and myself. The artwork for our goods comes from about 22 artists from all over the world.

Jeff and I are able to do a lot with so few people because we have continually invested in new processes and equipment over the years, a strategy I had to adopt during the economic downturn, when employing someone new was too risky. Now we have some of the coolest leather working machines out there and I drool over my wishlist of upcoming machines.

Let’s follow Trolley and take a look at the operation…

Ubiquitous branding shot.

The first belt buckle I ever made. Hand carved out of wax and cast in plaster. Pewter pellets were dropped into the negative and heated with a blowtorch.

Jeff inspecting the belts after our specially formulated spray coating is added to protect the images in the leather.

Inspecting the straps after they are done curing. This one will be a guitar strap.

Hand setting some snaps for a belt order.

Every online order gets a personal note.

Our branded MADE IN THE USA, WASHINGTON DC stamp applied with a 1950’s roller embosser.

This is our roller embosser.

27 ton clicker press used to punch out of the various shapes for things like guitar straps.

Left: punch press/stamper for making all the holes in the belts perfect every time.
Right: Leather splitter for thinning down leather. The whole thing is basically one big blade.

One of our industrial sewing machines. I like using the Adlers.

Left: A Juki automatic sewing machine, which helps us put on the tags on all our tees.
Right: A pneumatic stamping machine for stamping the inside neck of our tees so we can be tag-less. I hate tags in t-shirts.

A wide view of our work bench where we prototype and assemble belts for online orders.

And this is Scarlett, my girlfriend’s blind dog, who often joins me in the shop. She is not just a little blind, she is totally blind. We have to tie her to the shop couch or she’ll wander around and get scared and poop somewhere. This has happened many times.

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Thanks to Jon Wye for giving us a glimpse of his process and studio! Visit him at booth #88 at our upcoming Art Star Craft Bazaar on May 9th + 10th at Penn’s Landing Great Plaza! Visit his website and buy his cool shiz HERE.

April 15, 2015
Meet New Art Star Craft Bazaar Vendor Marcella Kriebel

photos and text by Marcella Kriebel

I am a watercolor artist and illustrator from Portland, OR, living in Washington DC for the last 5 years. I’m excited to be a part of the Art Star Craft Bazaar for the first time this year. Because my work covers food themes and cooking, I can be found at select Farmers’ Markets as well as Art and Craft fairs in the Mid-Atlantic and on the West Coast.

I’ve always really enjoyed cooking and traveling. I’ve made a point to cook with people during my trips throughout Latin America, and it is through these experiences that I created my cookbook, Mi Comida Latina. The book is entirely hand lettered and includes my watercolor illustrations on every page. The style reflects my sketchbook journal that I keep during experiences abroad- small step by step drawings and lots of color throughout.

I published the book thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign in November 2012. This self-published edition of the book is sold out, but I’m excited to share that the Art Star Craft Bazaar will be my first Craft Fair showcasing the published edition of the new book. This new edition will be a bigger and better version with an additional 40 pages!

After the Kickstarter edition of the book came out, I got a number of commissions for food-related artwork and custom illustrated recipes (a service I still offer) and my food-related collection began to flourish.

I like to work in a series and have explored various fruit and vegetable “families”, complete with Latin names. I have designs which celebrate the different types of cheeses, figs, olives and other delicacies.

My Art Every Day project from 2014 expanded my collection immensely and I’ll be offering many of these designs as prints for the first time at the bazaar. Hope to see you all at my booth, #118, Mother’s Day weekend!

April 14, 2015