Venture through the brilliantly blue framed doorway at Sarah Cavender Metalworks and you’ll find a truly unique business. Cavender and a small staff of painters and metalworkers craft jewelry and accessories that might be unlike anything you’ve seen before.
Then again, you might have seen Cavender’s work — gracing the waist of Kim Kardashian, in photo spreads featuring Brooke Burke or offered in upscale catalog collections. If you did, you probably never guessed those handcrafted earrings, bracelets, bags or belts were made in Oxford, in the back of the corner building at 500 Main St. 316 Stainless Steel Wire Mesh Price
Sarah Cavender Metalworks features a retail store up front, with the “factory” in the back, where Cavender and her crew bring her designs to life. Through the years, her extensive line has been featured in trade publications and top fashion magazines such as Vogue, Mademoiselle, In-Style, Glamour, McCall’s and Lucky in the United States and abroad. She says her designs are offered in many museum-type stores and upscale boutiques.
Perhaps the most unique element of Cavender’s designs is the base element of most of them — a fine fabric of mesh that is molded into a variety of shapes for various functions. The delicate mesh and wire are used to model forms from nature.
“It’s so soft and fine looking,” Cavender says, “and it’s metal.
“Nobody does what we do,” she explains, which is what people who make a living from artwork aim for. “You carve out your niche.”
It took some time for Cavender to perfect her processes and build up to having her own business. She came to Calhoun County by way of the Philadelphia College of Art.
“I cleaned offices and houses for three years out of school,” she says. She started going to trade shows and learning the business part of selling her art.
Along the way, Cavender married, moved to Miami and started a family. They decided to move back to Calhoun County to be closer to the rest of her family in Heflin. Family ties brought her to the area, she says, but it also was a financially welcome move. The cost of living here beats the cost in South Beach.
Cavender settled in Anniston and found a place for her business in Oxford. She has become a strong supporter of the local art scene and of local causes, namely SAVE, a spay and neuter program geared toward curbing the number of homeless pets. She has participated in a number of fundraisers for the program, putting 25 percent of event sales to the betterment of Calhoun County pets.
Cavender was born in California, but with a father in the Air Force, growing up she saw a lot of this country and some others as well.
She found herself studying in Philadelphia, majoring in sculpture. She took a jewelry class and discovered an area she enjoyed.
“I enjoyed working with metal. I like working on a small scale. I liked working with things I could hold,” Cavender says.
She discovered a screening manufacturer that made and sold the flexible metal mesh that she came to use in her designs.
“I started scavenging in their scraps,” Cavender says, for materials. That Philadelphia company still supplies much of the material used in her creations.
About 1984, the art student was pondering the future, and her sculpture teacher evaluated her work.
“My sculpture teacher said, ‘You’re pretty good at that jewelry stuff. You might want to think about that,’” Cavender says.
Thinking about it, she decided to pursue making jewelry rather than sculpting for her artistic expression. “I decided people buy a lot more jewelry than they do sculpture,” she says.
Her initial studies weren’t lost in the new concentration, she said. Much of her jewelry and accessories have a sculptural element, but it’s often sculpture of a softer variety.
Much of Cavender’s work features floral designs, natural and insect shapes, along with abstract forms.
To make them, she learned the many ways to work with the products she chose.
“I learned the oxidations, the plating and finishing techniques,” she says, that can be used to give the bronze screening and other metals she uses different textures and coloring.
Sarah Cavender Metalworks produces seasonal collections of jewelry and accessories each year. With each collection, she says, the color palette is changed and new products perhaps brought in. The colors for fall are herb; sage and pond (midnight blue); wisteria; Marsala; orange; a buttery yellow; rose (soft pink) and bay (a tealish shade); and storm (dark gray).
A popular recent product has been a kind of scrunchy bracelet, a tube of the flexible mesh screen, to be worn around the wrist and molded to the wearer’s liking.
The products are handcrafted: It is artwork, not costume jewelry, and Cavender says the cost of the items reflect that. “Sometimes people don’t understand the cost of a handmade product,” she says.
The specialty remains mesh jewelry, belts and handbags, hand-made to order for individuals, or for a catalog or store.
In working with museum stores, Cavender says, she can craft variations on her designs that will accompany the work of another artist — for example, developing a color pattern to match a Van Gogh or a Georgia O’Keefe exhibit.
Cavender uses materials made primarily in the U.S., with stones imported from Europe. The jewelry is largely made of brass, with some copper braiding. The industrial-knitted look is made of an iron-copper alloy or monel. The earring posts and wires are titanium or anodized titanium, given a complimentary color for the individual designs.
After each piece is handcrafted, it either is plated or oxidized, then finished with a lacquer coating to seal and to enhance the look of the piece. Cavender says the colors used are hand-mixed with tints and bronze powders in lacquer, applied by the artists who work under her supervision. Many pieces are made to order, but Cavender’s designs also are offered in the retail storefront at her Main Street metalworks.
Cavender hopes to build the retail aspect of the business as Oxford develops its downtown as a center for art, unique shops and eateries.
“Hopefully, it will bring a lot of foot traffic,” she says.
In the meantime, people can continue to watch for Cavender’s designs in various catalogs. It seems to work in cycles, she says, with some catalogs including an artisan’s work one year, then going with others the next. Sometimes her work has been in three or four catalogs at a time, and it can be hectic keeping up with the orders.
Steel Wire Screen That is part of the challenge, according to Cavender, of balancing beauty and business behind her bright blue storefront on Main Street.