For Warren Feld, Jewelry Designer, beading and jewelry making endeavors have been wonderful adventures. These adventures, over the past 25 years, have taken Warren from the basics of bead stringing and bead weaving, to wire working and silver smithing, and onward to more complex jewelry designs which build on the strengths of a full range of technical skills and experiences. He, along with his par
tner James Alfard Jones, opened a small bead shop in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, about 20 years ago, and called it Land of Odds. Over time, Land of Odds evolved from a bricks and mortar store into a successful internet business – www.landofodds.com . In the late 1990s, James and Warren opened up another bricks and mortar bead store – Be Dazzled Beads – in a trendy neighborhood of Nashville called Berry Hill. Together both businesses supply beaders and jewelry artists with all the supplies and parts they need to make beautiful pieces of wearable art. In 2000, Warren founded The Center For Beadwork & Jewelry Arts (CBJA) – www.landofodds.com/beadschool . CBJA is an educational program, associated with Be Dazzled Beads in Nashville, for beaders and jewelry makers. There is a strong focus here on skills development. There are requirements for sequencing the student's classes; that is, taking classes in a developmental order. There is a major emphasis on teaching how to make better choices when selecting beads, other parts and stringing materials, and how to bring these altogether into a beautiful, yet functional piece of jewelry. www.LearnToBead.net is our recent effort to extend our CBJA philosphy and successes to a broader audience on-line. Warren’s commitment and concern for the "teaching of beadwork" resulted from watching and talking, over the years, with customers in the shop, who had taken classes elsewhere, or tried to teach themselves from books. These beaders were not buying parts or using parts to their best advantage. It was obvious that many people had taken classes, but that they weren't necessarily learning something -- at least not learning something that would stick with them, and that they could comfortably apply in other situations. They were memorizing steps, rather than integrating organized processes of thinking, thus designing. Most classes and books about beading or jewelry making typically come out of the Craft Perspective, where you learn a set of steps and end up with a particular project. But when you leave that class, you haven’t learned how to apply those steps to any other situation, and you probably forget how to do the project. At the shop, Warren and his staff do a lot of re-teaching -- putting things learned into a broader context, showing alternative ways of achieving the same ends, explaining how the choice of materials used in a project will affect how it’s done, and how durable it will be over time. Warren leads a group of 12 instructors at CBJA. He teaches many of the bead-stringing, jewelry design as well as business-oriented courses in the CBJA curriculum. He works with people just getting started with beading and jewelry making, as well as with the program’s advanced bead study groups. These groups meet bi-weekly to learn, try out and experiment with beading techniques, sometimes exploring issues cross-culturally, and othertimes, examining the works of particular bead- or jewelry artists over the course of their design careers.
