Craft skill transfers to jewelry art

Check out this article on jewelry artist Lauren Van Hemert which discusses how she went from scrapbooking and tablecloths to polymer clay art.

“For my mom I had made this tablecloth where I ironed on family photos. …everyone wanted to know how to make that tablecloth. That’s about the time I started teaching.”

A way with clay: “I started making jewelry, and because it’s so nice and lightweight, I started making big necklaces.” The store Raindrops on Roses in Raleigh asked Van Hemert to teach a photo transfer class using vintage cigar labels they planned to sell. “I had read about this transfer technique using gin. I didn’t really believe that it worked. It was so challenging. I went to throw my piece away, and I thought, if I can crumble it up to throw it away, I bet I can wrap it around a bead.” And so she did.

From class to cash: During a polymer clay workshop with author and artist Irene Semanchuk Dean of Asheville, Dean noticed Van Hemert’s necklace, made of polymer beads covered with vintage cigar labels. “Because she had much more knowledge about polymer clay than I did, she knew that no one was wrapping a colored image around a three-dimensional object. Most polymer clay artists, when they do transfers, they do one-dimension flat transfers. So it’s really become my signature technique,” she said. Dean urged Van Hemert to stop teaching and start selling her artwork.

Craft to art: “Somehow it went from church shows to doing the Baltimore show,” she said of the American Craft Council’s juried show she attended in February.

“A year ago I was juried in to Artspace [in Raleigh], and I would say that really was the catalyst that changed me from being more of a hobbyist to a business. And I went from being a technician to making a work of wearable art.”