Dunkington Art & Jewelry offers locally-made handcrafted curios
It is always emphasized how important it is to shop local; some reasons being that when you shop local, you are supporting a local family. Another reason is that some local businesses offer some things that big supermarkets do not.
Dunkington Art & Jewelry is a local business located on South Lafayette Street in Downtown Starkville offering a variety of custom-made art pieces, jewelry, and accessories from various materials such as acrylic painting with resin finishes and acrylic poured jewelry.
Josh Herrington runs Dunkington with his wife, Brandi, and her mom, Deborah Duncan, and he talked briefly on what all the three do around the store.
“Everything we have here is locally painted; it’s all hand poured either here or at our shop at our house. All of the wooden cutouts are all cut at home by hand,” said Herrington. “Brandi and her mom usually do a lot of those, because I’m up here working.”
Dunkington is open from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Tuesdays through Saturdays and is closed on Sunday and Monday. Those two days may seem like days to rest, but not for Herrington, his wife or his mother-in-law.
“We started using those two off-days with the intention of resting, but we’re usually up here mostly working. We generally try to take Sunday to be a day for us at the house to catch up on chores, wash clothes, clean up a little bit, and then Monday we come up here and work in the back while we’re closed,” said Herrington. “Reason being that it takes about two weeks for us to make this stuff. By the time you get some of the cutouts cut, poured, dried, resined, and cured, it takes about a week and a half or two weeks for some of it. We tell everybody that the stuff we have is not stuff that we bought from a magazine and have it shipped to us from China, it’s stuff that we have to go to the back and handmake. So, if we run low of our inventory, we have to go in the back and work to refill stock.”
Herrington said that it is about 50/50 between he and his wife, Brandy when
it comes to the creativity of the store’s products.
“We have our own aesthetic, our own colors. [Brandi] tends to skew more towards blues and more natural looking colors such as the blues, the greens and the turquoises. I tend to skew a little more on both ends,” said Herrington. “I’ll go crazy with wild colors or I’ll go a little dark sometimes with black, some browns and some greys and things like that. It’s really a good mix between the both of us, I take care of the wild and subdued, and she is just a good artist in the middle there with all of the colors.”
One of Herrington’s favorite pieces he likes to make are hand made wooden cutouts that are either cut into the shape of a state or a favorite pet.
“I enjoy doing the cutouts, because the bigger you make them, the more colors you can put into them. You have a bigger canvas, a bigger area for the color and the pattern to show. They’re fun to do. They’re pretty easy to clean up after you finish making them while other projects are not as easy,” said Herrington. “All of the cutouts are made out of a material density fiberboard. Everybody thinks it’s glass, but it’s really just a regular piece of wood. We buy the 4x8 sheets, then we have a pattern that we trace and cut them all by hand; 95 percent of all the shapes in here are cut by hand. We’ve cut everything from Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, California, New York, Maryland, we can do all of the states. We’ve done some dog shapes, specific dog breeds that people have such as dachshunds, shih tzus, I think we’ve done a pug for somebody. So, we do a lot of it all.”
Herrington also said that the store’s inventory always changes constantly, and everything is unique and one-of-akind. They offer items from wine glasses to salt and pepper shakers to wall art to candles, coasters and earrings.