time Archives - Try Handmade

Leah Sawyer

August 13, 2019 by Erika Jurney 3 Comments

Gorgeous lampwork.

Leah Sawyer: I began making jewellery in 2006 and have been successfully selling my work through a number of wonderfully supportive fashion and giftware boutiques in Sydney.

Working with glass has been the most rewarding artistic process that I have pursued and I am constantly amazed and inspired by the medium. I am eager to keep exploring and expanding my knowledge and range of skills.

Whilst I can find inspiration in almost everything, I am most drawn to pattern and repetition. I have a particular fondness for 1970’s wallpaper and fabric designs.

Due to the amazing response to my pieces, in 2009 I decided to pursue jewellery making as a full time occupation.

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What Does Home Mean to You

August 12, 2019 by Amy L. 1 Comment

The image above is from Gbrosseau Photo

I’m writing this at the end of a wonderful long weekend, and as the title suggests, I’m pondering the meaning of the word home. Why now? It’s been on my mind for months really… We currently live right downtown – and while many of our friends have found this to be an ideal environment for raising kids, for me personally, I’m not sure that it feels right.

Both my husband and I fondly remember childhood days spent frolicking in the forests near our homes, building forts, exploring, and having “adventures”. For me time spent in the forest feels as natural as eating or sleeping – despite having lived in cities of various sizes from the age of 11.

The city we live in and the surrounding countryside have an increasing problem of affordability – and many people are forced to move further and further out into the suburbs.

While the suburbs are an option – my husband will continue to work in the city for the foreseeable future, and many of the suburban areas that appeal to us involve an hour and a half commute. And I think it’s tough to know on the outset what kind of experience you’ll have in the suburb you choose. Some neighbourhoods are certainly more community minded and friendlier than others.

This past Tuesday I was busy planning our hike for this weekend and thought it’d be fun to go a bit further afield than usual, to Bowen Island (a 30 minute ferry ride from downtown). I started reading about this jewel of an island on the Pacific and I really liked what I read. I was actually so distracted by everything that I read that it made it tough to work that evening. We decided we ought to go for the weekend as perhaps this is just the type of place we want to call home. Bowen is a heavily forested island with a year round population of 3,000 people that swells to over 4,000 in the summer. It has a quaint downtown with shops, restaurants and a vibrant artisan community. There are no chain stores of any kind. Instead you’ll find miles and miles of trees and hiking trails, hemmed in by rocky bluffs and sandy beaches. The island has a strong history as a place of deep community ties and its populace is very involved in civic affairs.

The image above is from Spread the Love

After this weekend I’ve fallen in love with the island and I know my husband has warmed to it too. As city folks we aren’t that involved in our community right now. It’s easy not to be in the city. I volunteer as much as I can for a local social enterprise, and we make time to see our close friends – but other than that we often find ourselves working long hours, which often seems necessary to keep our entrepreneurial ventures healthy. Now as we ponder the next stage of our lives, thinking about our future children and putting down roots, we’re forced to ask ourselves just what home means to us, and what we should prioritize. We’re planning to visit Bowen again in September to learn more about the island, and we’re considering giving it a test run as renters, perhaps next spring. So for now, things are up in the air – but in the meantime, it’s given us plenty of food for thought as we plan for the future.

I’d love to hear some of your experiences as you were looking to settle down and have kids!

Diana Fayt Ceramics

August 10, 2019 by Erika Jurney 2 Comments

Diana Fayt: Diana is both a traveler and a lover of home. She gleans inspiration from nature, the mundane and life’s stories. Her ceramic pieces are often narrative with marks of time, events and images seen and experienced and then drawn into the surface of her clay platters bowls and vases. By doing this she hopes to leave a permanent mark that expresses her vision of what she experiences in the world around her.

[via Bazaar Bizarre’s Maker Faire vendor list]

TQB Designs

July 30, 2019 by Erika Jurney Leave a Comment

I’ve featured TQB Designs work before, but how could I help showing you this stunning new bracelet?

TQB Designs: I have been making my beaded rounds for almost 15 years now. I am self-taught in the art of bead weaving and developed a system to create these textural rounds, ovals, squares, cylinders, and barrel shaped beads.

I meticulously weave each bead myself in the traditional gourd stitch and each woven sphere contains anywhere from 50 – 700 individual seed beads.

I also create many of the metal worked components. I found it more and more difficult to find the exact commercial part that reflected the look I wanted with my jewelry. So, I decided to start making my own that conveyed my aesthetic and found it so much more satisfying taking the time to make something,for example, as simple as a beautifully designed ear wire.

Mid-century Redux

July 26, 2019 by Rebecca Hadfield 1 Comment

My son remarked to me the other day that he felt that he had been born about 25 years too late, and should have grown up in the 80s. I laughed and told him that I thought the same thing about myself; I would’ve been right at home growing up in the mid-50s/early-60s. I have always been drawn to the architecture and design of the era and I can’t honestly remember a time that a good Formica counter top, a sunburst clock or an Eames chair didn’t make my heart beat a little faster. Eco-friendly tote, featuring an Eames chair silhouette (below), by Modist.

I don’t know if Atomic Age design ever really went away (not in my books, anyway), but it has really made quite a comeback over the past few years. I’m sure a big factor in that has been the popularity of the program Mad Men, but I like to think that it was just the world coming to its senses. After a couple of really questionable decades of design, we are once again appreciating the clean lines, bright colours and clever shapes of mid-century modernism.

Some creative craftspeople, like Mark and Jeff of Ypsilanti, MI are taking this appreciation one step further and incorporating the everyday items of this time into fresh, new objects of desire. Take this piece, for example – a simple container intended to store your leftovers has been taken off kitchen duty and transformed into an awesome table lamp (above). Check out the Boots n Gus shop for even more lamps in all sorts of shapes and sizes, like the pendant light at the top of this article; you’ll be seeing Tupperware in a whole new light!

Another ingenious example of retro kitchenware finding a home in the living room is this eggbeater clock, pictured above, by Kim aka The Sassy Crafter. Made from 12 recycled electric beaters (and a whole lotta cheek), these clocks are a brilliant reinterpretation of the classic mid-century sunburst design and can be purchased as-is from Kim’s shop, or custom ordered to match your decor.

When we’re talking about mid-century design, I can’t go without mentioning the advertising of the age. It was a time of rampant consumerism and the ads were a perfect reflection of that; shoppers scrambled to fill their homes with the optimistic, modern goods that would separate them from the stodgy belongings previous generations. To that end, ad agencies seized the opportunity and pushed the idea that new was best and the future was now, such as in this advertisement for Scripto Satellite pens, cleverly made into a durable coaster (below) by Jenn and Jenny of Robot Candy. Maybe it’s just me, but 50 years later it still makes me want to buy a pen (and a coaster, for that matter)!

Ironically, our nostalgia for this time has us channeling the Drapers and filling our homes with the relics of the atomic age. Even with the advances in science and technology since then, the many of the designs and fabrications still seem modern and relevant…perhaps the future is (still) now.

“Mad Men”-inspired print, above, by Yumalum.