Buttons and Beads From An Artist's Studio
The New York Times, Sunday, February 21, 1999
By Susan Pearsall

A decade ago, Karen Hennessey of Lakeville had earned impressive artistic credentials: After graduating from the Philadelphia College of Art, she owned a successful rubber stamp greeting card company, and also apprenticed with a fine jeweler. But she said she was at a crossroads, and her first child, Zachary, was an infant. "I couldn't have a metal studio to make jewelry," Ms. Hennessey recalled recently. "It's just too toxic a situation."

Karen Hennessey in her Lakeville Studio

That Christmas, her mother gave her 10 small blocks of brightly colored polymer clay, a synthetic modeling material that can be hardened at low temperatures in a kitchen oven. Ms. Hennessey purchased an instruction book and began experimenting with the clay.

"It just took me away," she said. "It gave me a whole new way of working that combined color, jewelry and beads, which had been a passion of mine my whole life."

Recently, buttons marketed under her new trade name Zecca (Italian for a place to mint coins) were pictured in Vogue Patterns magazine. Her buttons also have appeared in the Maine designer Jill Eaton's best-selling books of knitting patterns for children's clothing. Soon, Ms. Hennessey will be sending out her first mail-order catalogue of 25 to 30 reproducible designs. Many more designs, which cannot be duplicated (due to the organic nature of creating clay patterns), result in 25 to 150 copies of a button that are sold to stores through sales representatives.

This year, Ms. Hennessey said she expects to sell 8,000 buttons as well as fancy barrettes, pins, necklaces, eyeglass and key chains and small vessels. Her buttons retail for $4 to$6 each. They can be machine washed and dried, but not dry-cleaned. The jewelry costs from $20 for a small pin to $200 for an elaborate necklace.

In an interview in her studio, a large room full of windows and skylights over the garage, Ms. Hennessey talked about her work and her interest in innovative color combinations. Working with polymer clay has given the artist needed flexibility as her family has grown; Zachary, now 11, has two siblings: Alex, 7, and Isabella, 4. "It's something that I can spend a very long time at and stop and walk away," she said. "I just close the door."

She was wearing one of her new creations: three-dimensional flower earrings in shades of lavender, maroon, teal, mint and pumpkin. Although the combination sounds garish, it looked refined. Her reading glasses, titanium half-frames in blue, teal, and purple, hung from her neck on a string of two-dimensional clay beads in assorted, brightly colored designs. Even the address numbers on her house are made of vividly patterned polymer clay.

Among the button designs in stock and in progress were a pink spiral flower with a zigzag leaf border, a red heart in a lime green hand, a black and white dog, checkerboards in various colors, abstract patterns, an intricate gray-and-black beetle, a llama, a fish and a black-and-white striped toggle.

Ms. Hennessey's use of color appears both playful and cultured. "People have described it as sophisticated, because it is pushing past the normal," she said. "I'm using it in a way that can be taken seriously, that can be put on a $300 hand-knit sweater." She buys Fimo polymer clay, a stiff variety that holds detail well, by the pound in 15 colors, which she uses to mix her palette. (Fimo and Sculpey III, a softer polymer clay popular with children, are sold in two-ounce blocks at better toy stores and craft shops.)

The initial color mixing takes place in a food processor, where blocks of clay are chopped up together. Then, Ms. Hennessey uses a Lucite rolling pin to flatten the clay to a thickness that can be fed through a hand-cranked pasta machine. Running the clay through the pasta machine mixes the colors thoroughly and improves elasticity, she said. The pasta machine also is used to roll out thin sheets of clay in different colors that can be stacked to form stripes.

For a simple button, Ms. Hennessey rolled out a sheet of yellow clay. She laid sheets of stripes on top of the yellow clay and rolled it up like a jelly roll. The resulting log of clay had a spiral design running through the length with a yellow border around it. Each slice cut form the log shows the pattern. This technique of combining bars or sheets of color into cane has been borrowed from Venetian glass makers who named it millefiore, or thousand flowers, for the detailed images they produced.

The cane is then lengthened by rolling or pinching and pulling, which reduces the size of the design while maintaining its detail. To make a more complex design from the same cane, Ms. Hennessey said she could cut it into four pieces and bundle them together to make a design with four spirals.

Some of Ms. Hennessey's most complicated buttons are pictorials. She picked up a cat face, framed with fur and an elaborate border of dotted triangles. "I started with the eyes," she said. "I made a green circle, and I inserted the little pupil." There were other canes for the whites of the eyes, the nose, the mouth and the cheeks. "These picture canes are group of canes that are then brought together to make the face," she said. Generally, a complex cane measures several inches across before it is reduced to button size.

It takes the artist about 10 hours to make a complex cane, which yields about 200 buttons, as well as several pins, cut from larger slices. All her work, no matter the size, bakes for 30 minutes at 265 degrees in a convection oven, she said. For the last three years, Ms. Hennesseys's buttons and other items have been sold at the Wool Connection in Avon. "Many times, we'll design a sweater around a button," said the store's owner, Phyllis Fishburg. A sunflower button became the inspiration for a knitted vest with matching pocket embroidery featured in the store's mail-order catalogue. Ms. Fishberg said the buttons were great for garments for children or grown-ups. Currently, Ms.Hennessey is stretching her horizons by making three-dimensional jewelry and finials for lamps and curtain rods. She said that the button business "is the way to support myself in pursuing the soul work, that which is really going to satisfy me as an artist."

Ideas for designs come from several sources: leaves and petals in nature, textiles, and any scrap of pattern or color that appeals to her. "I rip out things from magazines all the time," Ms. Hennessey said, pointing to a studio wall covered with thumbtacked pictures.

Despite the clay's enticing colors, Ms. Hennessey does have days when inspiration does not come easily. When that happens, "I'll mix colors. I'll make stripes," she said.

There are difficult days, like the time Ms. Hennessey discovered that she had sold all her Peruvian cat buttons with the checkerboard border, and had to make more that looked exactly like the first batch. "I didn't know it was hard," she said. "And it was torture."

After a decade of experience, Ms. Hennessey said clay still presents challenges. "I'm not bored, and I don't feel like I've completely mastered it," she said. "I always think that there's someplace else to go."