Monday, November 15, 2010

Commemorative NYE, NYC, MSG Token

Ever since I attended my first Phish show, I was taken with the community, the art and most of all, the music. As a maker of little things, I love the merit badge concept and it inspired me to create a token. Since I work in metal and I'm excited for the New Years Run in NYC, a token, reminiscent of subway tokens, was an appealing idea. It's made of pure silver and is the size of a quarter. Each one is hand made by me. A great gift for your favorite Phish head! It comes in an archival coin display holder for $25, HERE
It's also available as a pendant HERE and comes on black waxed cotton cord (16" or 18") with sterling ends and a sterling lobster clasp. Or on a sterling chain for $45 - just check my shop.
In addition to the commemorative fish and apple, and "NYE, NYC, MSG", all three show dates are inscribed among the lines on the edge. A limited edition of only 100 tokens will be made to order. Definitely a collector’s item, and maybe the start of a new token series?

I'm donating a portion of every sale to the Mockingbird Foundation because as important art is to me, I couldn't live without the music and I want that to be true for future generations.

Check it out, the token is featured on CashorTrade.org!

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Some Personalized Pendants, just in time for the Holidays!

You get to choose, one of the twelve classical signs of the Greek/Roman Zodiac. We've been fascinated by the zodiac for ages, the idea that our lives are influenced by the heavens above...

I've made my own textures and I press them into pure silver. The process of pushing the texture into the silver allows for a funky, cracked, natural edge. My favorite part! For that reason every piece is different and unique. A great necklace for layering with other chains. A great gift and perfect for a man or woman.
The back has my JK logo (also the Chinese symbol for 'forever').
Or a sweet little initial pendant...
Made to order! Find them in my Etsy shop.

Monday, October 25, 2010

Holiday Show Schedule

The Artist Market season has came to a close. Now I have just over a month to create lots of lovely pieces for my holiday shows, can't believe it's that time again! Below is my holiday show schedule. Doin' my usual, wonderful VT shows and this year, just to make things interesting, I'm throwin' in a weekend at the Artist and Fleas in Brooklyn. Woot Woot!
Women's Festival of Crafts - Friday, Nov 26th 5-9pm
Saturday, Nov 27th 10-6pm
Sunday, Nov 28th 10-5pm
City Hall, Burlington, VT

Artist and Fleas
Sat Dec 4th and Sun Dec 5th
12-8pm both days
Brooklyn (Willaimsburg) NY

Sweet Lady Jane
Trunk Show Sat Dec 11th 10-5pm
40 Church St, Burlington, VT

Holiday Artist Market Fri Dec 17th 12-8pm
Sat Dec 18th 10-6pm
City Hall, Burlington, VT

Find my work everyday at Trinket 32 1/2 Church St, Burlington, VT
And online in my Etsy shop.

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Happenings...

This past Thursday, Rachel had a fashion event at Sweet Lady Jane featuring Covet (a fabulous eco-friendly clothing line) and my jewelry. My work showed really well on Covet's flowing fabrics of solid color. You can see Brett Lupfer's amazing photos HERE. These four close-ups of Kate wearing my big earrings look like they're out of a magazine!


In other news: I was mentioned on Vermont Edition on VPR by a kind and lovely customer on Wednesday. They had Martha Fitch, Executive Director of the Vermont Crafts Council and Anne Majusiak, curator for the State Of Craft Exhibit at the Bennington Museum on to talk about the craft movement in VT. You can hear the whole show HERE or just the snippet HERE.

Also, I've been running a local (to Burlington, VT) promotion: "Get caught!!!" After noticing a lot of lovely ladies sportin' my wares around town, I was inspired to reward this patronage with a discount towards jewelry purchased during the month of October. I've assembled a street team and they're on the lookout. Get "caught" in
Jennifer Kahn Jewelry and get 20% off your next piece (redeemable at the Burlington Artist's Market or online in my Etsy Shop).

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Copper Candy Collection!

Perfect for fall! Flame-patinated and hammered, embellished with sterling wires and wraps. Big and bold but lightweight.






Thursday, September 30, 2010

Press, etc.

Some exciting press:
•I had an article in the Burlington Free Press yesterday.
•I was interviewed for the Vermont Cynic earlier in the month.
•At the beginning of September I was Trinket's first, first Friday guest artist.
•I'm now in the habit of regularly updating my Etsy shop! Yes!
•Also I just joined twitter.
It's been a busy month and things are only getting busier! Stay tuned for my holiday show schedule.

Friday, July 9, 2010

Evolution of a Design

A while back a friend asked about one of my signature designs, my "patches" and how and when I started incorporating them in my work. I wrote a lengthy e-mail about it and she suggested that it would make a great blog topic...

I started working with PMC in 2000. Most of my first attempts were crude and simple. I made a LOT of leaf rings and I set a lot of dichroic glass. I worked, I played, I experimented, I made many unsavory pieces, until I began to find my voice. In 2004, I made a piece called Broken World. It was one of the first pieces that I made that I considered to be “art”. Celie had taught me how to construct a hollow lentil bead by making the two halves, letting them dry and putting them together with slip. It was a process that required a certain level of perfection, which made it all the more satisfying to cut into and ‘break’ my little world. But it was sad to see it go from lovely and smooth to damaged and cracked. So I carefully made little patches with faux rivets and patched it back together. Celie called them bandaids. I liked the look so much that I began to intentionally break pieces and patch them back together. My work was going from organic to kind of industrial. I made some simple overlap rings and used multiple patches and big square patches and placed them over the overlap. Those led to my round shield rings with faux rivets. (Please forgive these early photos, they are simply scans from a time before I had a digital camera.)
I double majored in Art and English and aside from writing e-mails and articles I felt I wasn’t doing enough to honor the English major in me. So I started making book pendants. I made them in two sizes big and small and they sold well but they were a huge labor to make. They featured 5 pages of ancient texts. Each book contained a page with a moonstone on it that could be seen from both sides, a page with a hole in it that revealed the moonstone again, a page covered in 24k gold keum-boo and a page where a 'window' was cut out to reveal the gold page. I broke all of the edges of the pages to make them look old and fragile. The book could be worn backwards or forwards and the pages could be flipped to be worn on any side. When Celie and I traveled to Japan in 2005, I was told my book pendant was very wabi sabi.
Robert Diamante took a beautiful photo of one which I featured on the home page of my first website, next to a little animation of the pages flipping. I was so excited to see it among the amazing work at the 2nd PMC Conference in Barbara Becker Simon’s slide show “We're Serious About This!". She also presented her slide show to the Society of North American Goldsmith’s Conference and compiled it onto a CD.
I wanted to have a more affordable version so I made page earrings and single page pendants to sell in the galleries and boutiques that carried my work.
I continued to make my patched rings and I was lucky enough to have one published in Tim McCreight’s book PMC Decade.
photo by Robert Diamante
One of my favorite things to do is to set stones (a lot of Chinese Turquoise) and unusual things. I developed a technique for setting them in PMC (after firing) and wrote a chapter on the subject for Tim’s book PMC Technic. I try to make as many of my pieces reversible as I can. Celie taught me that “the back of a piece is another opportunity for creativity”. I embellish the back of my shell pendants, with my patches and one of them is featured in the book. photo by Robert Diamante
In early 2008, Celie passed some of Bill Struve’s BRONZclay my way. It was love at first sight. The idea of making the ‘thing’ to be set was just so exciting to me. The bronze looked so old and primitive. So I made my own “Modern Relics”. I made my first metal clay cuff bracelet and encouraged it to crack so I could patch it up.
At the PMC Conference that year, Bill gave a slide show that featured some of my first Modern Relics. It was so great to be able to work big with this material so I started making patched bronze bowls. They had a wonderful sound. I made them over oiled light bulbs and when I took them off they would crack but the patches kept them together.
photo by JP Candelier
That year a friend gave me a small bag of Herkimer diamonds that he had mined and I wasn’t sure what to do with them. They were too small and jagged to set and they had no holes for stringing. As I was setting a patched relic into a PMC bezel, I realized there was a perfect little space for them and they could move around and catch the light and be held in place by the patches. I liked the idea of taking my patch design a step further by having the negative space contain something, by having the patches have a purpose, they created a closure. Now the setting was holding the relic and the relic was holding the stone. Tonya Davidson featured one of these rings on her website and continues to use it in her magazine advertisements. (Thanks Tonya!)
I wish I had more photos of pieces with my patches that I've made and sold over the years. Looking back at a decade of my work, I notice it has changed over time but the patches remain a constant.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Apprenticementor.com

Announcing --- Apprenticementor.com - a non-profit website where apprentices and mentors can find eachother.

This is an idea I've had for years and years, based on the success of my apprenticeship with Celie Fago. Suddenly everything was aligning to make this project a go. Most of all - the generosity of Simplenation.com in creating the website. I would happily write more about it here but why not just check out the site? Apprenticementor.com

From Burlington to Bennington

So, it's been awhile. I carry a lot of guilt for not keeping up with my blog. But, what can ya do. You can only move forward and hope to do better. I don't know where the time went but I know I was busy...

Even this post is something I wanted to write over a week ago. Excuse me while I play catchup...

Saturday, May 22 was a BIG day. For weeks I worked on my new venture (more on that in the next post) and on making jewelry for the Burlington Artist Market. It was a crazy juggling act. Then the day came and there I was, at the first market of the season and it was AWESOME! How I missed the familiar faces and kids and dogs and food and art... we even had perfect weather.

Then we made our way down luscious, winding roads to the Bennington Museum for the Opening of "State of Craft" an exhibit that
"celebrates the artistic, social and economic history of the studio crafts movement in Vermont over the last 50 years." I'm so honored to have my Journey Necklace in such an important Exhibition.
I wouldn't be if it wasn't for my mentor: Celie Fago. The Opening was great, an exceptional exhibit, old friends, new friends, amazing food, blue grass music and an opportunity for us to pass out cards and talk about our new venture...

Friday, January 29, 2010

Onward and upward and forward and now...

Now is the time of organization, with the new year comes a fresh start and, for me, a great sense of motivation. I want to grow, I want to make things more efficient, I want to be more productive while following the notion "work smarter not harder". I want to breathe in all the good, live in the moment and go with the flow...
Winters can be hard... so cold and so dark but they also make for a quiet time to get things done. In my first effort to get more organized I changed up my website a bit. I like having a "Current Work" section to show the kinds of pieces I make (but which aren't always available in my Etsy shop). The gallery of photos was getting longer and longer and there was no rhyme or reason to their placement. So, I created a gallery of galleries and moved all of that work (and more) into collections.
What a difference it makes - to me at least! As a visual learner, it's so nice to see it that way and even to just have it as a reference catalog for myself. One little step for my website but one large step for my sense of progress!
The holiday shows left me with not much jewelry so I'm busy making some work for my Etsy shop and for Trinket in time for Valentine's Day. Then back to working out the quirks...
Happy organizing!