American Craft Council Show

I attended the ACC show on Wednesday, February 24th with my Metals and Jewelry II class. I tried my best to center my attention on the jewelry vendors as I had a short amount of time. One of the first vendors we came across was Ashka Dymel. She had some really neat work dealing with similar techniques to what we are learning now. She deals a lot with inlays and has this technique of melting a sheet of gold leaf onto another metal. It's a technique called kum-bu or some variation of those letters. I thought it was really neat and looks gorgeous. i would love to try it but Janet says the materials we work with aren't pure enough. Maybe next year. She also does fabulous work challenging what is expected to belong in a bezel.


Later down the line we stopped at the booth of Connie Verrusio. Her work was very inspiring and was made using all techniques that we are working with. She uses common objects and very delicate sawing to create wonderful, approachable jewelry. Her work has a very mechanical feel to most of it. We asked her about her soldering technique and she told us about the powdered solder that she uses. It helps her to solder down such delicate pieces with no solder leaking between the pieces. I think this is definitely something to look in to. She also told me about the requirements for sawing into coins and her experiences with photo etching.


We breifly passed the table of Namu Cho but he was dealing business at the time so we didn't stick around. He seemed to have beautiful pieces incorporating delicate gold work into steel.


We made our way over to Jennifer Cho's table and talked briefly to her about her experiences in the business. She had very small, intricate soldered pieces that were a magnificent display of repetition. All of her pieces seemed to require a great amount of patience and a deft hand. Jennifer is a very nice woman and was eager to share with students entering the major.


We spent a very long time at the table of George Sawyer. I was very impressed by his interest in spreading his knowledge. I noticed that he ignored a phone call and a buyer to continue talking with us. He introduced us to the techniques associated with Mokume and Mokume Gane as well as with his own method that he calls "Koi." The precision and care that goes into every fold of Mokume is just astonishing. I later heard from another vendor that Sawyer is called the "American Father of Mokume" and I can very well understand why. He has a beautiful technique of slicing the metal such that he has the same image on two pieces. He then makes these into one-of-a-kind perfectly matching, intricate wedding bands. I think the idea of the "perfect match" reflected into these band is just spectacular. I know who I'm going to when I get engaged!


At this point our time was almost up. We saw a few more artist very quickly, none I feel I would be doing justice to mention so briefly. I would say that the most important thing I got out of this show was from George Sawyer's words of parting to us:

"One thing to always remember is to make each of your pieces tell a story. It could be a simple story like 'I am a fish and I'm swimming," but make sure each piece has something to say."