Get a jump-start on holiday gift-giving and learn about the ancient craft of jewelry making at Windsor Historical Society.  On Saturday, December 9, from 2-4 p.m., watch the creative process at work as five of Windsor’s talented jewelry makers demonstrate traditional and cutting edge jewelry-making techniques and offer works for sale.  This program, coordinated with the Windsor Chamber of Commerce’s White Lights Holiday Shopping Extravaganza around town is free to the public.  Lis-el and Alexis Crowley of Art and Soul gallery will create hammered metal and wire jewelry and show metalsmithing, as well as demonstrating the newest technique in the jewelry-making world:  creating jewelry from precious metal clays.  This technique uses an organic base in which microscopic particles of silver are suspended.  This material can be shaped like clay.  When the piece is kiln-fired, its organic base burns off, leaving pure silver which can then be polished into the finished piece of jewelry.

Bead-making is one of the earliest art forms: clay, bone, shell, metal and glass have been used for thousands of years to form beads.   A lampworking glass bead-maker from Lucinda’s Bead Store will bring a small hot rod torch and demonstrate how glass beads are formed by melting glass rods over the heat and rolling them around a steel mandrel.  Bead-makers Joan Benoit and Michele Herzfeld are two Windsor artists who produce beaded jewelry. Watch all five talented artists at work and see an exciting selection of necklaces, earrings, brooches, bracelets in a variety of media on display and available for purchase.        

This free program is part of a series of public programs associated with the Society’s fall/winter exhibition Windsor Artists: Then and Now, sponsored by an anonymous donor, Rabbett Insurance Agency, the Town of Windsor through its Arts and Culture granting program, and Windsor Federal Savings.   The Windsor Artists:  Then and Now exhibition will be open to the public before the jewelry demonstration program.