Searcy woman creates custom jewelry, teaches techniques
Searcy woman creates custom jewelry, teaches techniques
Janet Pace is a walking advertisement for her own jewelry. She was even sporting a pair of her own earrings while deer hunting last week with her husband, Harry. “I wear my jewelry when I go line-dancing or to the gym. You never know when somebody’s going to see you and say, ‘Where’d you get that?’” Pace said, laughing.
Her handmade creations are in demand as she prepares for her last Searcy Parks & Recreation annual Holiday Craft Fair, set for Dec. 7.
At 70 years old, the Searcy resident plans to continue creating jewelry, but she said the shows are physically demanding, and the time has come to slow down.
Pace, who grew up in Dallas, Texas, went to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. She didn’t major in education, she said, “because I knew I’d never teach children.” She majored in clothing and textiles under the home-economics department because she wasn’t interested in the option of foods, either.
“My parents were always very artsy and craftsy, refinishing furniture and different things. I guess it runs in the family,” she said.
She and her husband, Harry, married 50 years ago in August and had three children. Pace devoted herself to being a full-time mom.
“I raised my children, and then in 1986, I started my business with a line of patterns for making Battenberg lace and smocking for women — clothing designs for women that weren’t big, maternity-looking things.
“All my designs for smocking were very streamlined and nice looking. Battenberg lace was mostly collars and things like that,” she said. “I would draft the patterns and write the instructions. … My college [education] came in handy.”
When she turned 40, Pace injured her back water skiing, getting up on an unbalanced slalom ski, and took a break from her business for a couple of years while she healed.
“I met a lady who had a knitting machine, and that was very intriguing to me. … I started designing patterns for people who had knitting machines, and I traveled to different knitting-machine seminars and sold my patterns and taught the techniques.
“I did something that was pretty unconventional at the time using my sewing knowledge. You could make a big
I’ve learned everything I know about jewelry-making from some of the best jewelry makers in the country”.
Janet Pace
JEWELRY ARTIST
piece and cut out of it like it was yard fabric … off the bolt, and combine fabric and knit and make clothing. To some people who were the purists, they thought it was awful. I thought it was great,” she said.
“I cut my pattern piece out of the knit and cut some of the other pieces out of fabric and combined the two — knit and woven fabric” in clothing. “I was kind of a pioneer in that department.”
Her sister, who teaches at a visual arts center in Punta Gorda, Florida, started going to the William Holland School of Lapidary Arts in Young Harris, Georgia.
“She’s also very creative,” Pace said. “She said, ‘You have to come with me to this jewelry school.’”
That was in 2000, and Pace and her sister have been going to the school for a week once or twice a year since then. Pace said she fell in love with jewelry-making. “You go for a week and take one discipline, like wire work or silver soldering, with the same teacher and the other six or seven students for the week. [The school] feeds you, provides room and board.
“This was my sister and our time to be sisters together for a week and have no other distractions except having fun and making jewelry,” Pace said. “I’ve learned everything I know about jewelry-making from some of the best jewelry makers in the country.”
“[Over the past 20 years], I’ve learned how to do lots of different things. The things I enjoy most are wire work [done with hand tools] … and silver soldering. And the last four years, flame painting. That’s my current favorite work,” Pace said.
“I learned the flame-painting-on-copper technique in Mountain View at the Ozark Folk Center from [Skip and Racheal Matthews], who developed it 30 years ago,” Pace said. “In flame painting, a tiny torch is used to create shapes and a variety of brilliant colors on copper. There are no chemicals or paints involved — only heat.
“I also do chain-making. Chain maille is small, wire rings, jump rings — a metal ring, and you open and close the rings and create different patterns. You can make bracelets or chains or pendants, or all sorts of things with it.”
Another technique Pace uses is glass fusing, where “you stack different colors and types of glass on top of each other and put them in a kiln … and heat them until they fuse together.”
She also creates lampwork beads, using a torch to heat glass and wind it around a mandrel and create a glass bead, like those used on Pandora bracelets, for example.
In addition to jewelry, Pace also creates leather bags.
About the same time she started making jewelry, St. James Catholic Church, where she is a member, started hosting a craft show in November. She always had a booth at the show. Then when the Catholic church stopped hosting a craft show, the Searcy Newcomers started one. And when the newcomers decided to stop having the craft fair, Pace took her wares in November and December to the Holiday Craft Fair at the community center.
She has been participating in craft shows for almost 30 years, selling various crafts and, for the past 20 years, selling her jewelry, she said.
“After that long a time, there are probably some other things I need to be doing,” she said. “I’m 70 now; it’s time. It’s physically hard to go and set it up and take it down. “I’ve been doing [an event at] Pioneer Village for the past several years; it was 34 degrees this year. I’ll still be doing stuff, but I won’t be doing shows.”
Barbara Hubach, office manager for Searcy Parks &Recreation, said Pace “will be terribly missed, as she has one of the most popular booths because of her expert craftsmanship, quality and beautiful work.”
Pace said she will continue to do custom requests for customers and may open a shop on Etsy, an e-commerce website.
“That’s popular, and I think I can reach more people. At Etsy, they’re looking for unique, mostly handmade things,” she said.
She also has a booth at The Artistry on Main Street in Searcy, an artist cooperative that includes more than 40 artists, and will continue to be there.
Pace previously taught jewelry-making to adults in Searcy, Sherwood and Fayetteville and teaches flame-painting at the school in Georgia now.
“I might teach again. I don’t know what the Lord has for me to do, but I’m sure he will guide me where I’m supposed to go,” she said. And wherever that is, she’ll be wearing her own creations.