Bucks guild ends its lengthy drought of craft shows

A door at the Asa Packer Mansion Museum in Jim Thorpe opened for Lara Ginzburg — and she happily walked through.

This was no ordinary passage. Ginzburg eyed the filigreed wrought iron, which seemed to flow into heart shapes, and thought how well the forms would work as jewelry. She snapped a photo.

Back in the upstairs studio of her Lower Makefield home, Ginzburg sketched elements based on the center of the door into a pendant. The border lent itself to two earring designs: one dangling, one button-shaped.

She is debating how to execute her idea. Wire work is a possibility, as is enamel on metal. “I’m not sure yet,” says Ginzburg, an accomplished jewelry maker and metalsmith who, except for two recent classes, is self-educated.

Gathering inspiration and laboriously bringing it to life by hand, tool and eye is the craftsman’s calling. Ginzburg is among a group maintaining a lively craft tradition in the Delaware Valley.

More than 100 belong to the Bucks County Guild of Craftsmen, which, after a hiatus of about seven years, is holding a juried show Saturday and Sunday at the New Hope Winery.

The group suspended exhibits and sales because “everybody and their brother was having craft shows, and it was becoming difficult for people to differentiate between the good and the bad,” says guild president Cynthia Prediger of Kintnersville.

In previous years, the Bucks County guild held shows at Delaware Valley College and the Middle Bucks Institute of Technology. Members also exhibited their work at shows organized by the Pennsylvania Guild of Craftsmen, of which the Bucks County group is a chapter, and at local craft events in Doylestown and New Hope.

The Bucks County guild’s new venue is in the air-conditioned surroundings of the winery’s events hall, which features its own lineup of wine tastings and food.

Craftspeople are scheduled to exhibit pottery, textiles, metalwork, cabinetry, paintings, folk art, photography and fine woodwork. All follow an inner mandate to refine and perfect form and function in handmade objects.

Ginzburg, a structural engineer by training who had an early inclination to art, began her explorations in jewelry design with beading a few years ago. A memorable early acquisition was a large strand of red coral her husband, Eugene, bought her at the Golden Nugget Flea Market in Lambertville.

Some of her works are made of silver clay, an amalgam that is shaped, dried, fired in a kiln and then polished; other pieces are made by piercing sheet metal. Some of her jewelry is enameled.

“I’m getting ideas faster than I can make them,” she says.

Ginzburg has an eye for the dramatic possibilities of pendants, two of which came from a trip to Israel earlier this year.

For one, she took a tiny print of a photo she made of an ancient mosaic known as “the Mona Lisa of the Galilee” and built a square silver frame to surround it.

In the other, an open, oval-shaped box holds a tiny piece of an old glass vessel, which she found lying on the ground at her feet on an archaeological site in the Israeli desert.

“I wasn’t digging for it,” she says. “If (excavators) left it around, they left it for me.”

Other work incorporates beads, semiprecious stones, geodes glittering with rock crystal or pearls. She sells the results on Etsy, an online site for handiwork, but sometimes doesn’t have to post pictures of her jewelry.

“People on the street will approach me and ask (to buy my work),” she says.

This was the fate of some of her plentiful supply of red coral, from which she made herself a necklace.