Marla Gassner – Inspired by Butterflies
by Donna Zaidenberg of Studio Beads
As an only grandchild, at 6-years-old, visiting relatives could be a lonely business. Marla Gassner says it was when an aunt and a grandmother shared their costume jewelry and their cache of buttons in old mason jars that she had something to do on those visits. Eventually she got to take home some of these treasures, and she would separate the buttons and beads into glass baby food jars by color. She then taught herself to string these baubles on dental floss to make her first jewelry.
Her inspiration for color came first from climbing trees in a park near her childhood apartment in the city watching how the light changed the ground. Shortly thereafter the family moved to a home in Evanston.
It was here, roaming in the open fields that she learned to catch butterflies with her hands and observed the many colors on their wings. Flitter Studio, Marla’s teaching and design business, is the result of these beloved childhood experiences and she uses the butterfly as part of her logo.
Marla was trained as a research technician at Cook County Hospital and then worked at Children’s
Memorial Hospital, until she married and became a mother. In 1970, she took up 3-dimensional
decoupage using techniques she devised herself. Once she learned the techniques she could not stop making shadow boxes and soon there were 70 overrunning her bi-level and her two babies. She took
these to a small, one-day arts and crafts show and sold all of them and came home with a mailing list of people who wanted to take lessons from her. This was the beginning of her teaching career that continues to this day.
Marla was juried into the North Suburban Embroiderers’ Guild and for several years she just came to the meetings and was inspired. Then she decided to try to do the yearly summer embroidery challenge, entitled, “This is My Family.” She won first prize, a 14-carat gold engraved pin. It was one of the most exciting days of her life, she recalls. After that she was asked to join the board where she served as program chairman for the next 4 years. She was an active member of the Embroiderers’ Guild for 17 years.
Her evolution continued into macramé. The art of adornment and the psychology of why we might choose to decorate ourselves had begun to fascinate her and brought her back to the happy pastimes of her childhood. She decided to explore creating jewelry in every form she could, first applying the fiber skills, embroidery, needle weaving and macramé. She continued this journey, while her children were growing up, by studying silversmithing and enameling, which led to a yearly sales event called “Designing Women”. The shows ran for 7 years and were a vehicle that made Marla realize that the things she created could be a commercial success.
Divorce made her second guess herself about being an artist but a chance meeting with a psychic convinced her to go back to being the artist she feels she is. She has been designing, teaching, lecturing, writing, and selling her unique jewelry ever since.
Her wonderful jewelry is inspired by her study of Victorian, Native American and Oriental jewelry and crafts. Many pieces are multi-stranded; yet interpreted in a light and airy manner with her original and unique techniques and the materials she uses. She designs one-of-a-kind pieces, preferring to create from inspiration alone rather than making duplicates of previously successful pieces. She says she would be bored merely copying, even her own work. Each piece is exotic and unique. It is a wonderful gift to be able to have your own signature work and yet not lose any innovation in the process.
Marla joined the Bead Society of Greater Chicago 11 years ago and chaired the first Bead and Book Sale at Heck’s Hall in 1992. She participated in many Bead & Book Sales, in all the Art of Beadwork Shows and presented a program to us in 1996.
Her first book, The Bead and I, One Woman’s Journey was published in 1997 and has been a great success. She hopes to have her second book, currently named BEYOND The Bead and I, Book II, will be finished by the end of 2001.
This year Marla will be teaching at the Bead & Button Show in Milwaukee in May, and lecturing and teaching at Embellishment in Portland Oregon in July 2001. Her lecture at Embellishment, a retrospective of the history and evolution of her work over the past 30 years, is called Necklace Princess. This name was given to her by one of her customers who came to the Designing Women yearly show to buy new pieces of jewelry. (This customer probably has the largest collection of Marla’s work.)
Marla says, “The wonderful thing about jewelry is that it has a life of its own, and it gets to go ‘out’. Marla may never have gone to the Governor’s Ball, but her jewelry has!
Marla now shares the art of teaching with her two grown daughters, Suzanne and Jennifer, both professional teachers. She thinks that when one feels passionately about something, teaching it comes naturally. She says when she seeks to capture the beauty in the color of the light it is with the beads, and that work brings her closer to her soul than any other.
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