Maia Rees
by Brenda Ross
Mention textiles and most people will not think of jewellery. But since spring 2002 Maia Rees has been developing her designs and techniques for a machine embroidered range, and the earrings are proving popular.
Having machine embroidered the fabric in a 7-inch frame, she cuts out the small shapes, seals the edges with a liquid proprietary product, stuffs the shapes with wadding and stitches them into metal rings or squares that she has made. Sequins and beads are added to the fabric and/or metal.
Maia had started using the technique for pendants, feeling that it would be difficult to get two earrings to match. However, she has achieved it. From each piece of fabric she can cut eight pairs of earring pieces, and on average she can get seven matching pairs from these. As she uses multi-coloured threads for the embroidery it is not possible for the position of the colours in the stitching to always match exactly, but this is not noticeable as the overall effect of both earrings is the same and she uses an attractive blend of colours. The retail price of her earrings ranges from £10 to £14.
She started making the earrings after her mother reported that customers were asking for them when they saw the pendants. Maia's parents sell her jewellery, and occasional cards, as part of their own craft business, Temima Crafts. Ray and Kathy Sylvester were both teachers who took early retirement in 1995 and now travel the craft circuit selling their own wood turned items, cards and textile art.
Kathy taught textiles so Maia was brought up with the subject and studied it at O level. However, when she left school in Ilkeston, Derbyshire, she studied for a degree in hotel and catering management at Leeds University, and then stayed in Leeds working for nearly 7 years in the customer service department of Bass the brewers, dealing with publicans on the phone. But she was involved in crafts as a hobby, from appliqué cards to making all the Christmas presents one year, and she made some earrings. "But when I look at those earrings now it is mortifying," says Maia.
Starting a family meant that Maia took part-time work so she could spend more time with her daughter, until she and her husband moved in spring 2002 to the village of Welland, near Malvern in Worcestershire. She has become a registered child minder, and while this was welcomed in the village, she has not found any customers, probably because a local employer pays a contribution towards employees' child care in a nursery, but not for child minding. However, this has at least given Maia time to develop her craftwork.
Her jewellery is on sale in a small local gift shop, and in a gallery in Malvern where she works for 14 hours a month in exchange for her work being on display. Maia has also exhibited at a couple of small local shows, and hopes to attend larger shows when she is more established.
She took a silver jewellery course last summer to increase her skills, and her "5-" includes taking a City and Guilds embroidery course (when she has sold more work to pay for it), finding more retail outlets, and producing a brochure. She is also working on expanding her range with some larger items and has made a prototype of a mirror and a pinboard, both enclosed in embellished fabric produced on the same basis as for the earrings. She hopes to have these on sale by the spring. Her work will no doubt evolve further, and she intends to just "see where it goes".
