Posted by Amy Jo Johnson | The Bay City Times
Kathy Maciag said it’s hard to describe her love for metal.
“I’ve always liked metals … I just like the feel of metals,” she said.
But this 61-year-old Bangor Township resident and registered nurse isn’t into banging out body work on cars or recycling metal at scrap yards.
Her penchant is for making jewelry – bracelets, necklaces, earrings and rings from copper, sterling silver, bronze and brass.
“I can’t afford gold,” she jokes.
Making metal jewelry, she explains, is not an inexpensive process. A small piece of sterling silver the size of a regular Post-it note costs roughly $50.
“So you better not make a mistake,” Maciag said.
And then there’s the cost of the tools – a drill, for example – to make her creations look the best they can.
She sells her pieces, on average, for anywhere between $10 to $150.
Ideas, she says, come from magazines and jewelry she sees while out and about. A tiny notebook stashed in her purse is used to jot down drawings for later use.
She’s careful, she says, to add details that are uniquely her own so as not to copy other’s work.
Maciag sells her wares at The Store@Studio 23 and at The Apple Tree store in Cadillac.
She attends juried shows in Cadillac, Traverse City and Elk Rapids. And she never misses the YWCA of Bay County’s annual Riverside Art Festival each spring.
“I’ve probably been doing (that) 15, 18 years,” she said.
Maciag describes jewelry-making as a wonderful, creative hobby she’s enjoyed for years.
“It gives me joy to take a flat piece of metal and come up with something like this,” she said, holding up a pair of copper earrings.
Plus, when you have a bad day, working with metal is a unique way to work out aggressions.
“Man, you can just take a hammer and pound the heck out of it,” she jokes.
And sometimes it’s just fun to see what you can create. For example, Maciag holds up an ugly, dull piece of copper tubing she found in the garage and then shows a polished bracelet she made.
“It’s fun to see out of some dirty piece what you can make,” she says.
To learn her craft, Maciag took classes at the Midland Center for the Arts. It was there that she discovered fabricating – the process of shaping a plain piece of metal into something beautiful.
She’s has been hooked ever since. So much so that while Maciag has her own at-home studio dedicated to her art, she still takes lessons from a Sanford woman, a practice she’s been doing once a week for nearly three years.
Someday, possibly next year after she retires, Maciag says she hopes to have more time to dedicate to her craft. She said she’d love to someday make jewelry to go with outfits for a clothing store.
Source: http://blog.mlive.com/
