Katherine Natalia Wadsworth
I first met Katherine Natalia Wadsworth of Natalia Designs at the Kansas City Bead Blast in May, 2006. Her unique style caught my eye, and she was a delight to visit with! Katherine will be attending the Bead and Button Show in Milwaukee, WI June 12-18 2006 at Booth 713.
I love to hear the stories of how artists began working in their craft; many have started making jewelry while working a completely in another totally unrelated field, and then found their hobby became their passion. From reading your biographies on your web site, it looks like you followed this same path! Can you tell me more about your journey to becoming a glass and jewelry artist?
I was working as a college professor at the time I started working in glass and silver. There were things I loved about that, and things I hated, but one part of that life that frustrated me was that however hard I worked at teaching and research it rarely ended with tangible results.
I started taking a night class in silver casting and fabrication at a local community college just to have something concrete to do. It was a sudden urge that I followed, and it was only one night a week for three hours, but I found it enormously satisfying. To sit and make something with my own hands; something I could touch, take home, and show to people from any walk of life, that just felt great!
I was happily learning metal techniques when I saw Cindy Jenkins’ book, Making Glass Beads. Cindy’s book was a gateway to lampwork for a lot of people. You just look at those pictures and, if you’re like me, you want to know how that’s done. One two-day class in the basement of a local stained glass shop, and I was completely hooked on melting glass. It was a good long while before I made anything I loved, but the process itself had that same satisfaction — I was doing something with my own hands that produced amazing (if sometimes ugly) results!
I think that working with metal and glass, and maybe particularly some of my very detailed etching and other techniques, really draw on the same detail-focused part of my mind that I had always employed in my more “brainiac” pursuits before. So, it’s a natural outlet for my, well, let’s just call it my “meticulous” personality.
3-D work, such as your beads, is incredibly difficult to photograph. What tips do you have for readers on how to achieve fantastic quality photos like those on your web site, brochures and post cards?
Well, the short answer is that if you want to get great shots with less effort — hire a professional! There’s really no substitute for the professional eye. But I do shoot some of my own work; in fact I shot most of the pictures on my site using a little 2-megapixel camera. The key to shooting tiny, shiny things is to figure out a way to get strong, diffuse light and then practice, practice, practice. Digital photography at least makes the practice stage cheaper!
While at the Kansas City Bead Blast, the glass Honeycomb Bead pendant that you were wearing grabbed my attention. I’ve never seen another artist do glass beads quite like it…what’s the story behind the development and creation of these awesome, unique beads?
The Honeycomb Beads are not for everyone, but all the glassworkers who see them want to know how they are done. They are something I created in a dream, long before I had the skill and control of heat to make them a reality in the torch.
I had just started making detailed etched designs on my beads, and I had a dream of a glass honeycomb that would be part of a necklace with an etched honeybee design I had just completed. Once I thought of how to make the basic structure, making multiple disk beads along the length of a mandrel and then folding them together, it was a matter of developing the control of heat that would allow me to keep all those disks warm enough not to crack, yet cold enough not to slump or flop over. The three Ps again; practice, practice, practice!
I still have never created that necklace from the dream. One day I’ll have the etched honeybees in hand, and enough honeycombs made at once, and then it will come into being!
As a side note, I’ll be demonstrating the technique for creating the Honeycomb Beads at the upcoming Gathering of the International Society of Glass Beadmakers, in Kansas City in July.
You have an incredible range of styles in your bead making repertoire, from etched glass beads to detailed landscapes to mosaics, just to name a few! Do you have a favorite style and if so, why?
Thanks! Well, I can’t say I have a single favorite style, but I definitely have an obsession with transparent colors. I think the first attraction of glass for me was the color and transparency. Working with silver I was sometime frustrated with its opacity, but I was also never very attracted to faceted stones, the main avenue for adding color and transparency to silver designs. Once I started working with glass I just practiced every technique anyone would show me for a while. Lots of that was using opaque glass, working with dots and stringer to get interesting designs. Then I started to feel what was more interesting to me, and I just follow that urge.
These days I have my transparent obsession, but occasionally I still just need to break the pattern and do something else. That’s how that variety I have comes about: I play with my “usual” designs long enough to get bored and the need for something new sparks another idea (or another dream!) and I’m off to the drawing board to figure out something else.
Besides the etched glass designs and the Honeycombs, I think I’m proudest of my Mosaic beads. Really, they are just another application of dots, but connecting and melting them in a very particular pattern. It was gratifying to be able to think of something else, something different do with just dots!
Necklaces in your collection have particularly nice balance between focal beads and necklace chain/rope. When you design a piece, what comes first, the focal bead or the rope?
It almost always starts with the bead. I’ll have a focal bead that comes out particularly well, and I’ll need to come up with a necklace that will show it off best. I particularly love the way that working with pearls gives a glass pendant the richness that it deserves. I think when you set a handmade glass bead in a wonderful piece of jewelry it goes a long way toward changing the publics mind from “Oh, it’s just glass” so something more like “Wow, that’s handmade glass?” Of course, once I learned how to do bead crochet I had to take it to it’s most detailed lengths with complex patterns. And once I did that I definitely had some necklaces that were crying out for custom beads.
Beading Help Web readers reside across the globe and many may not be able to attend your shows. How can interested readers purchase your beads and jewelry?
I don’t do many sales through my web site, except to established customers who have seen my work, because I do not have it set up with “click me and buy me” sorts of settings. Anyone is welcome to e-mail me if they are interested in my beads, and I have done a number of cool custom orders this way. But glass and jewelry is still my second line of employment these days, so I can’t be too tied to fulfilling orders.
Tell me about your other interests and hobbies.
Outside of other arts and crafts, I still try to keep abreast of my old field (developmental psychology) and I sometimes get out into the wilderness to pursue my partner’s field — herpetology. Yep, that means running around in the wilderness bothering the lizards, snakes, turtles, frogs, and salamanders we come across. I love the outdoors, and have come to love all the creepy-crawly critters in it, so it works well. It’s also led to some crossover; recently I’ve been creating sculptural creatures like frogs and turtles on my beads, and once even a flamingo! Well, that’s not herpetology, granted, but some of my best friends are ornithologists.
