The Orillia Times' Roberta Bell interviewed Catie Raymond, during the lead up to the annual All Things Steampunk, and got a lesson in the steampunk movement. Here's what Bell had to say...
Each time she takes apart an old clock to find parts she can repurpose in her jewelry making, Catie Raymond is blown away by the intricacy of its design.
“It freaks me out that they actually made these kinds of things so long ago,” laughed the Coldwater-based salvage artist, who has made a career out of turning the old into new again.
Raymond, with her collection of anachronistic work, will be the featured artist Aug. 11 during Coldwater’s second annual daylong celebration of All Things Steampunk.
The steampunk movement — rooted in the idea of chronological inconsistency — integrates elements of the Victorian era with modern technology.
“I don’t know what draws me to it. I just love it. It’s so interesting,” Raymond, who sells her handmade jewelry alongside her other one-of-a-kind creations in her Coldwater shop, Off the Beaten Path, said, noting an important part of the movement is educating people about the past and about how technology was used and developed back then.
She wants her seven-year-old daughter — who, like most of this generation’s youth, is enamoured with modern technology — to know how we got to where we are today.
“Kids don’t get to see the work that went into the past,” Raymond said.
The steampunk movement started in the 1980s and ‘90s, but didn’t officially touch down in Coldwater until last summer.
The celebration began to take shape after a customer asked Suzy Burtenshaw, owner of Holly’s Beads, if she carried anything in the steampunk genre.
“This is a day where you feel like you’re in the early 1900s,” said Burtenshaw, who saw an opportunity to bring the past to life by sharing her research on the movement with others.
The inaugural event brought out more than 500 people, 200 of whom showed up for the Wye Marsh’s birds of prey show alone.
“It’s really cool,” Burtenshaw said. “It’s almost medieval with the owls and the hawks... and the falcons.”
In addition to birds of prey, All Things Steampunk features a costume competition, fresh-squeezed lemonade, craft tables and an array of eclectic art exhibits.
Everything from sculptures to mechanical contraptions and costumes to jewelry will be on display.
There is no other art event that actually takes place in Coldwater, Burtenshaw pointed out, noting the popular spring studio tour takes peole out of the village and into the artists’ homes.
“This is a way that we can bring art to the main street,” Burtenshaw said.
Five artists from the Coldwater Studio Tour — Debbe Bloom, Lou Robitaille, Wendy Lynne Rinehart, Betsy Waterson and Ann Hallet — will be participating.
All Things Steampunk is about getting people together and sharing ideas, said Raymond.
“I just like the creativity of it,” she said. “I love taking old things and making them... new and being able to use them again.”
Read the full article here.
Andrea Gordon from the Toronto Star sat down with Catie Raymond last fall and had this to say...
The ‘junk’ jeweler
Catie Raymond has always had an eye for beauty in the most unlikely places.
She spots it in the innards of old watches, bits from a plumber’s toolbox and old copper wire. Then she transforms the junk into jewelry.
“I was always an old soul,” she says. “I rescue stuff and use up some of the junk that would end up in the dump.”
Raymond, 52, fashions bracelets from copper plumbing chains, ribbon and old charms. At her studio in Coldwater near Orillia, she also creates one-of-a-kind necklaces adorned with antique keys, faded beads and gears from mechanical watches.
Little did she know that her lifelong habit of mixing and matching odd items would one day have a name — steampunk, which combines the modern tech esthetic with Victorian-era elegance and a touch of old industrial.
Today, designs mixing old and new are all over Pinterest, an online inspiration board. But Raymond was ahead of her time. In the era of global fads and cheap knockoffs, “now everyone wants something unique,” she says.
That hunger for quirk has propelled her one-time hobby into a business that now supports Raymond and her 10-year-old daughter Cassie.
The road to jewelry-making had several twists and turns. Trained as a graphic designer, it took Raymond a year on the job to realize she wasn’t cut out for desk work.
She then launched a flower shop in Toronto, but closed it after eight years and moved to cottage country with her husband in 2004. The plan was to have a baby and trade the city rat race for a chance to smell the flowers.
Their new property was bare, and when she couldn’t find decor in line with her taste and budget, she made her own. Friends who saw the birdhouses she sculpted from roof tin and barn boards, and her hand-painted signs and planters made of rusty tools and old window frames immediately wanted them too.
Soon Raymond was peddling her creations at local farmers’ markets and frequenting salvage yards for raw material. In her spare time, she made jewelry using the same trash-into-treasures principle.
Five years ago, she began “the next chapter” when a shop came up for lease in Coldwater.
There was room to display her yard art outside her shop, called Off the Beaten Path, but only a tiny space indoors. It seemed tailor-made for displaying small objects like jewelry. Her necklaces, bracelets, belts and other inventive pieces now account for three-quarters of her sales.
“It feeds my creativity every single day,” she says. And it fits her life as a mom who wants to be available for her daughter.
“I feel that I’m doing my little part in helping to recycle. I don’t do a whole lot for the world, but I try to make it pretty.”
Read the full article here.