Artist’s pendants keep deceased loved ones close
Throughout the days when she has a forever pendant holding her father’s ashes around her neck, Erin Barrett finds herself touching it in times of stress.
From the fused glass pendant, with just a small strip of ashes in it, she finds strength, something her late father often provided for her when he was alive.
Barrett, 48, visited Jamie Bowers’ studio at her Plain City home in May with her stepmother and two daughters to make the pendant. Bowers owns Glass Half Full, a business through which she sells fused glass pendants that she makes, and also hosts workshops so others can make them themselves.
“To be able to wear it is just a different feeling – you’re not looking at it, it’s on you,” Barrett said of the two pendants she has that contain some of her father’s ashes. “For me spiritually, I know he’s always with me, but knowing he’s right there ... It brings me a sense of calm.”
A few years ago, Bowers began putting the cremated remains of her loved ones in the pendants, and now she makes what she calls “forever pendants” for clients and teaches others to do it during workshops like the one Barrett attended.
“It’s very rewarding,” Bowers said of her work making forever pendants. “I feel like I’m helping people. You usually keep ashes in an urn and that’s all. If this is a way they can keep them close to their heart and have them made into artwork, it’s just different and special.”
Bowers worked as a graphic designer in marketing and advertising for more than 20 years, but left her job in November 2018, four months after her husband, Dave Bowers, died suddenly. She loved her job, but losing her husband and the subsequent loss of one of her cousins, her grandmother and a good friend made “life feel shorter.”
“I know it’s inevitable, nobody gets out alive,” Bowers said. “It just made me stop and think.”
She allocated the next two years to travel and decided the jewelry-making she’d been doing on the side would become full time.
Bowers started the workshops in May. She hosts them three to four times a month for $55 to $100 per person, and plans to focus on Glass Half Full for at least another year before re-evaluating what she wants to do.
Bowers enjoys working with clients to determine how they want their pendant to look, whether it’s guiding them in a workshop or working with a client to do a piece she’ll create herself.
“I want it to be a very personal experience, where I’m working with a client and they’re giving me ideas and I come up with the idea with them,” she said.
Kim McAuley, 58, of the North Side of Columbus, ordered three forever pendants made by Bowers to give to her family members at Christmas.
For McAuley, the experience of picking out the colors and designs of the pendants with Bowers was “wonderful,” she said.
“It was more than I expected, it was fascinating,” McAuley said. “It made me want to have a lot of them.”
McAuley got a pendant for herself, one for her sister and another for her sister-in-law, all with the ashes of a woman who was like a mother to them.
For McAuley, the process with Bowers was made more special by the fact that the woman whose ashes she had incorporated into the jewelry had a love of jewelry and a history of jewelry-making herself.
Seeing the finished pendants, McAuley said, gives a feeling of “when you’ve lost somebody and something happens that makes you think of them in a good, happy, cheerful way.”
She cried, saying the pendants brought “good tears and good memories.”