“I like color,” Barb Pelowski declares.

“That’s why I like working with fabrics, too. Color is what knocks my socks off!”

    Anyone who has seen her colorful quilted boxes with enamel “latches,” or her other cloisonné works knows she is not exaggerating. And shopping in her booth is like turning a kid loose with a new box of Crayolas – it’s hard not to “overdose” on the color possibilities. 

    “With enamels you get these shiny and bright colors. I like mostly working with butterfly and bird shapes – whimsical ones – and flowers, too, because I can make them any color I want.” 

     “There are some limitations in enameling,” she conceded. “You can’t mix colors well. You try mixing black and white and you get not grey but speckles. You have to go with the palette the manufacturer gives you.”

    And Pelowski searches the world for the best colors for her cloisonné works. She buys from France, Austria, England and Japan, as well as U.S. producers. 

    It’s a long and somewhat quirky road that has led the California native from a planned education career to one of full-time artisan making a living on the art fair circuit. 

     She’s grateful to have grown up in a family that encouraged creativity, Pelowski says. Studying for an education career at Sacremento State and San Diego State, Pelowski found herself filling a course requirement with Jo Ann Tanzer’s enameling class. The well-known enamelist had her students combing the junkyards for scrap copper that would later be “hammered, cut with shears or sawed.”  They also foraged for wooden foundry parts that were then assembled and adorned with enamels. 

      Pelowski participated in a few boutiques, juggling a schedule that included teaching at West Allis schools and raising her two children, Lisa and Brian. She continued her studies with Sr. Lucinda Hubing who worked primarily with enameling on silver. “But she told me I could continue to work with copper, which was more affordable, and eventually I bought my first kiln for $100. The latest kiln I bought – and it was almost the same size – was $1,000.”

     At the end of her course studies with Sr. Hubing, her mentor told the class, “Let’s go down to the Commons and sell some of the stuff you’ve made!”  Pelowski sold everything she had. “I had stopped teaching when I had little kids at home. But when I wanted to return to the classroom, art teaching positions were evaporating. Sr. Lucinda told me to do art fairs.” 

    With a wry smile, Pelowski recalled those early days of art fair selling during the recession of the late 70s and early 80s. There were no commercial canopies to be bought or fancy display systems. “Oh, no! We just used drop cloths. 

 “My very first art fair was at a place in Juneau Park near the lakefront, called the Alternate Site. It was on the same weekend as the Lakefront show. I used peg board and wired on every piece of jewelry. Don Nedobeck was across the way and played his clarinet. 

    “Thirty years ago, I built a booth out of furring strips and it was quite similar to the one I use now. It went on the top of the station wagon and it had to be racheted down so it wouldn’t fly off the roof on the freeways. When I arrived, I had to scrape the bugs off,” she recalled.

    But her scrappy start as an entrepreneur got side-tracked in 1980 when Pelowski had carpal tunnel surgery done on her right wrist and then on her left in 1985. “My mom came and helped me with the kids because I couldn’t even open a peanut butter jar.  She was a quilter and she knew me well. She brought along a lot of quilting strips and began showing me how to make boxes. She said, ‘When you get well, you’ll be looking for something to do’ and she was right.”

    Pelowski began playing with the quilting materials and adapting the design of the earlier boxes, moving the patchwork to the lid and using an enamel clasp for the box, thus marrying her original works with the new. 

     She fondly recalls her days in 4-H which gave her basic business skills. “I’ve been a good sewer, ever since I was 10 and in the 4-H Club. I learned how to run a business. I had strawberries and sold them. I learned how to keep books and how to talk to people. I always have liked to cook and, to me, the enamels are like making ‘copper cookies,’” she laughs.

    Today, her “teachers” are her customers. “I learn from people,” she admits. “At every show, someone will come up to me and ask, ‘Do you have such-and-such?’ Just fill in the blank. It makes me stretch. I always say that I’ll try. For example, I do fishes, but recently someone asked for a Picasso trigger fish, with his kind of coloring.

     “The most memorable piece I’ve done, I think, is a fish dish. I learned the technique from Harlan Butt of Texas – now isn’t that a name! He uses silver foil over copper so he can work on a large piece without the expense of using pure silver.

     “Another of my favorites is a Victorian House with a fence and shrubs, a many-layered piece,” she said. This one, too, can be found in her studio, where she has a small collection of her best pieces.

     Pelowski is content with her varied lifestyle. Winters find her rummaging through her cache of materials and sewing up patchwork patterns. Then in the Spring, she makes one box of each set of patterns. During the course of the art fair season, she “replaces” sold boxes until a style runs its course.

     She does about a dozen shows each summer, down from a grueling seventeen in 1995. She is constantly on a treasure hunt for colorful and intriguing fabrics for her boxes, often shopping abroad for unusual prints. And Pelowski has developed an eye for quality. “Once I was riding on the London Underground and saw a really pretty flowered skirt on a woman. I asked her if it was fabric from Liberty of London and she tipped me off to a store on Old Brompton Road where they sold fabric by dress lengths only – three meters! I usually only buy a yard or less, but my mom agreed to “split” the purchases with me….

     “With each fabric I use, I can usually remember where and when I bought it. Each has an interesting story and sometimes that story in itself helps make the sale.”

     Looking back on a typical year, Pelowski muses, “I like working at home a lot. I like the solitude and then the opportunity to go out and meet people (at art fairs). I need the feedback. But I also like my own solitude.”

     An avid reader (of both books and audio tapes), Pelowski is constantly seeking to learn and to grow. She helped to found the Great Lakes Enameling Guild in recent years and has watched it grow from five members to more than 60. This year she will be taking a couple of classes—studying with Mary Chuduk on shaping three-dimensional forms from copper mesh. And a later class with Don Neuwnschwander will involve forging Art Deco shapes from copper. 

     Pelowski likes to turn from doing boxes and cloisonné jewelry to making enameled bowls. “I love making bowls. It’s the sifting and putting things in and out of the kiln. It’s kind of liberating to do these, compared with the tediousness of cloisonné.”

Pelowski estimates she makes an average of 500 boxes a year, but she envisions a different way of life for herself in the next five or ten years. “I’d like to be ‘retired,’” she laughs. “Really, I’d like to just do some fine exhibit pieces, teach some workshops and tame the garden!”

     Besides more time for gardening, Pelowski tries to squeeze in exercise sessions, play times with her grandson, Jacob, and with her cat, Miss Kitty, as well as “creative sessions” with her friends. “I’m trying hard to get a real life, to get a balance and that’s not always an easy thing to do,” she said.

Out of the kiln	A fired bowl	Auditioning fabrics for her quilted boxes
Box parts, showing fabric and the rigid pieces	Here is Barbara sewing the Seminole strips for a quilted box	The Seminole strip assembly
A completed fish box	A photograph of Pansy boxes	A photograph of an Ultra-Suede box
A cloisonné detail for an Ultra-Suede Box	A photograph of a cloisonné Spiderwort Necklace	A photograph of Woven Grid boxes
If you have questions for Barbara, click here to send an e-mail to barbpel@wi.rr.com or visit her Web site at: www.barbpel.com Barbara Pelowski 8040 S. 66th Street Franklin, WI 53132 414-425-2465