And the Winner is…..

Land of Odds, Be Dazzled Beads, and The Center for Beadwork & Jewelry Arts are proud to announce the Winner and Runner-Up in this year’s The Ugly Necklace Contest!

The Winner of The Ugly Necklace Contest – the Jewelry Designer who demonstrated exceptional jewelry design skills by creating The Ugliest Necklace in America in the year 2003, and the winner of a $992.93 shopping spree on the Land of Odds web-site (www.landofodds.com), is:

Kathleen Lynam of Franklin, Tennessee, 2003 Winner

My Ugly Necklace by Saddam Hussein I thought I'd submit This necklace to you I've hidden all the weapons There's nothing to do. But I think it's pretty Not ugly at all -- Won't it look great with Some pumps and a shawl? (You can read the full poem on the web-site)

The Runner-Up in The Ugly Necklace Contest -- the Jewelry Designer who also displayed obvious design talents by creating the 2nd Ugliest Necklace in America in the year 2003, and the winner of a $399.07 shopping spree on the Land of Odds web-site (www.landofodds.com) is:

Natalie Zurawski of Springfield, Illinois, 2003 Runner-Up

One of A Kind I don't dress down When going out on the town, And I don't like to see Others adorned like me. The necklace that I wear Really makes everyone stare. Oh those crowds I can stun With my high fashion!

To view additional images of the necklaces submitted by the winner, runner up and the other semi-finalists of The Ugly Necklace Contest, please visit us at www.landofodds.com on-line, and click on Ugly Necklace.

Entries for the Second Annual The Ugly Necklace Contest will be accepted between September 1st, 2003 and March 15th, 2004. For rules, please visit our web-site at www.landofodds.com/store/uglynecklace.htm .

And if you are in the Nashville area, please stop by Be Dazzled Beads, where the 10 selected Ugly Necklaces are on display through September 15th.

For interviews with the Winner and/or Runner-Up, please contact Warren Feld for arrangements. 615/292-0610 or warren@landofodds.com .

It’s not easy doing Ugly!

So our hats are off, and we offer loud applause to the Kathleen Lynam (the Winner) and to Natalie Zurawski (the Runner Up) of The Ugly Necklace Contest. These two beadwork and jewelry artists have demonstrated their commendable design skills. They have been judged by a distinguished panel of six judges from The Center for Beadwork & Jewelry Arts in Nashville, Tennessee, and voted on by visitors to the Land of Odds web-site.

America has voted for the winner – The Ugliest Necklace in America! The Ugly Necklaces of 10 Semi-Finalists are currently on display on-line at www.landofodds.com. Visitors to the web-site viewed the necklaces, read the artists’ comments and poems they wrote about them, and voted for a winner and runner up between May 15 and July 14, 2003.

Ugly Necklaces. You've seen them! Perhaps you've even worn them. Perhaps you've been reluctant to tell someone that they were wearing an Ugly Necklace. Perhaps you've hidden some of your own-designed Ugly Necklaces somewhere in your bead room or closet. Perhaps someone you loved gave you a very Ugly Necklace.

It’s difficult to design an ugly piece of jewelry because your mind and your eye won’t let you go there. As research into color and design has shown, your eye compensates for imbalances in color or design component relationships – it tries to correct and harmonize them. You are pre-wired to subconsciously avoid anything that is disorienting, disturbing or distracting. Because of this, any jewelry designer attempting to achieve Ugly, has to have enough control and discipline to override, perhaps overcome, intuitive, internally integrated principles of good design. The best jewelry designers will be very aware of what these rules of design are, and thus be able to strategically, not just intuitively, know how to manipulate and apply them.

The Ugly Necklace Contest is one of the programs of The Center for Beadwork & Jewelry Arts in Nashville, Tennessee, to encourage beadwork and jewelry makers to test their design skills, push the envelope, and learn some fundamentals about jewelry design in the process.

To achieve a truly hideous result means making the hard design choices:

- Can I push myself to use more yellow than the purple warrants, and mix in some orange?
- Can I make the piece off-sided or disorienting, or not have a clear beginning, middle or end?
- Can I disrupt my pattern in a way that, rather than “jazz”, the result in fact, is “discordant”?

Adding to the fun, the piece of ugly jewelry each contestant created also had to be functional and wearable. This is what sets beadwork and jewelry design apart from other design arts. A piece of jewelry as art, (even ugly art), has to maintain its essence and purpose, even as the wearer moves, bends down, or rubs against things. Jewelry is art and architecture in motion, often frenetic motion. The pieces that make it up, and the techniques and designs which coherently interrelate these pieces must also anticipate this dynamic totality, as well. Otherwise, the piece of jewelry becomes a failure not only as a piece of jewelry, but of art, as well.

The Ugly Necklace Contest is an arena for budding and established beadwork and jewelry designers to strut their stuff – to show how adept they are at creating ugly-necklace-pieces-of-art.

The finalists of The Ugly Necklace Contest were those beadwork and jewelry designers who could best elaborate upon rules of design, whether intuitively or strategically. These rules of design are in effect an underlying grammar and vocabulary – the theoretical and professional basis of beadwork and jewelry making as art, not just craft.

To view the necklaces of the Winner, Runner Up and the other Semi-Finalists, please visit us at www.landofodds.com on-line, and click on Ugly Necklace.

Entries for the Second Annual The Ugly Necklace Contest will be accepted between September 1st, 2003 and March 15th, 2004. For rules, please visit our web-site at www.landofodds.com/store/uglynecklace.htm .

And if you are in the Nashville area, please stop by Be Dazzled Beads, where the 10 selected Ugly Necklaces are on display through September 15th.

The 10 Semi-Finalists:
1. Kathleen Lynam, from Franklin, Tennessee, “My Ugly Necklace by Saddam Hussein”
2. Tammy Hicks, from Old Hickory, Tennessee, “Flowers From Hell”
3. Vera Fox-Bond, from LaVergne, Tennessee, “Don’t Cry Over Spilled Beads”
4. Melissa L. Kahl, from Divernon, Illinois, “Beauty”
5. Valerie Lehman, from Pawnee, Illinois, “This necklace is so tacky…”
6. Meagan Miller, from Taylorville, Illinois, “Everything You Need”
7. Anita M. Tidwell, from Scotts Hill, Tennessee, “The ugliest necklace I’ve ever seen…”
8. Natalie Zurawski, from Springfield, Illinois, ”One of A Kind”
9. Nancy Rundhammer, from Apex, North Carolina, “Beach Combers Nightmare”
10. Robert De Luccia, from Ridgewood, New Jersey, “Ugly Truth”

The Ugly Necklace Contest -- The Story
How This “Jewelry Design Competition With A Twist” Came To Be

Beading has been done throughout history and in every culture in the world, though it is not always done in the same ways or for the same reasons. Sometimes beads are used instead of money, or to facilitate trade. Beads have some kind of intrinsic value that, in some cases, is more universally perceived, valued and accepted than minted coins, printed currency or items traded. Sometimes beads are used to justify inequities in power relationships. People with the more beads and beaded objects have the more power. Othertimes they are used simply to make someone look and feel more beautiful. Beads often bring people closer to a spiritual sense of well-being, such as a Catholic or Buddhist or Chinese rosary. Beads can take on symbolic meanings, such as how Zulu tribes people used beads to create a system of communication during apartheid, when they were restricted from speaking with one another by the powers that be.

While beads and beading have been important throughout time, this has been especially so in the United States since the early 1960s. America’s interest in beadwork over the last 40 years has become in and of itself a major social movement as Bead Craft has become Bead Art has become Bead Design. In the early 1960s, two new stringing materials were developed. One was Nymo thread, a nylon thread developed for the shoe industry to attach the bottom of the shoe to the top of the shoe. The other was a nylon coated cable wire called tigertail. Before this time, beads were strung primarily on cotton or silk thread, or nylon fishing line. Cotton and silk both break down within 3 – 5 years, so anything strung on them has to be redone. Nylon fishing line dries out and cracks in the heat, so it too is not a durable stringing material.

Thus, for the most part, before 1960, beading was primarily considered a home craft. Beading did not attract artists, did not attract fine craftspersons, did not attract academics, did not encourage people to push the envelope with the craft by experimenting with new techniques, designs and materials. While periodically in history you see examples of elaborate beadwork, such as French beaded purses in the 1920’s or Russian bead embroidery in the 1800’s, these works were primarily done by people who were either slaves, serfs or indentured servants. As soon as these people were freed (labor laws in France or deposing the Czar in Russian), the elaborate beadwork stopped. A rational person would not put this kind and amount of effort and investment into a piece that would have to be re-done every few years.

With the introduction and adoption of Nymo thread and tigertail into beadwork, the craft did attract these types of people. Suddenly artists, fine craftspersons and academics started paying attention to what they could do with beads. The first Bead Society was founded in Los Angeles in the early 1960’s. Today there are over 200 bead societies across US. Everyone has been getting into beading. There has been an explosion of magazines. There has been an increase in the number of bead research societies and bead museums.

Beading education has lagged the trend where Craft has merged into Art. Traditionally, classes in beadwork have been provided by stores that sell beads. These classes teach a particular technique to do a particular project, and are representative of a traditional craft-orientation. Design, theory, color issues are almost irrelevant. What is important is the repetition of steps to produce an object. And, of course, it is important that the stores sell more beads, secure customers and make a profit.

In the year 2000, we founded The Center For Beadwork & Jewelry Arts (CBJA) in Nashville, Tennessee. A small group of beadworkers, beading teachers and artists spent almost 1 ½ years researching the craft education field, to determine if they could come up with a more professional model for teaching beadworking and jewelry making. They broke down each type of bead weaving stitch and each type of jewelry making technique into more generic components. They evaluated whether it mattered, -- (and, if so, to what degree it mattered)--, what order these components were presented to the student. That is, if techniques were broken down into generic components, and taught in a certain order, would students learn better? Could beading be taught as a set of tools with theories and strategies for applying these tools? Could we control and measure student progressions through these ordered components and their applications, and award certificates of excellence to those who mastered these tools, and the accompanying theories and strategies for applying them? We answered yes, and began offering a structured, ordered, design-oriented curriculum in 2001. [The CBJA curriculum is outlined on-line at www.landofodds.com/beadschool/ ]

The Ugly Necklace Contest was one of the programs CBJA launched as a way to reaffirm our beliefs in a design-oriented, theory-based, professional craft education curriculum. The Contest was conceived as a fun way to break students out of the traditional craft mold, and get them to think, ponder, and translate their feelings and perceptions of what is “Ugly” into an organized and functional necklace design. [ www.landofodds.com/store/uglynecklace.htm ]

We made the contest national. We launched it on-line. Our goal was to politely influence the entire beading community to think in different terms and to try to work outside the box. We also wanted very actively to stimulate discussion about whether there are universal and practical design theories which underlie beadwork, and which can be taught. It has gotten a lot of attention.

We received 58 entries from twenty different states. Each entrant was asked to submit a hard copy photo of the necklace and a written poem. If they wanted, they could submit more than one photo. The purpose of the poem was to give the artists a chance to make their necklaces, and their design decisions, more apparent to the judges.

Different participants interpreted "Ugly" in different ways. Some focused on the ugliness of each individual component. They strung a bunch of ugly beads on a string. Some used materials that they felt conveyed a sense of ugly, such as llama droppings, or felted matted dog hair, or rusty nails, or a banana peel. Some focused on mood and consciousness, and how certain configurations of pieces and colors evoked these moods or states of consciousness. Others focused on combining colors which don't combine well. Some used cultural-specific or situation-specific definitions of ugly, such as an image of Saddam Hussein or the placement of orthodontia braces on an elk’s jawbone. Still others focused on how the wearer's own body would contribute to a sense of ugliness, when wearing the piece, such as the addition of a "Breast Pocket" which would lay just below the woman's breast, or peacock feathers that covered the wearer's mouth, or the irritating sounds of rusty cow bells, or the icky feeling of a rotting banana peel on the skin.

Six judges were selected who were associated with The Center for Beadwork & Jewelry Arts. They met one evening to review all the entries and select 10 semi-finalists. The first part of the evening was spent in a training session so that these beadworking teachers and artists could practice applying 10 jewelry design criteria in judging entrants. They were presented with four conceptual precepts underlying the creation of the Contest itself:

1. The Necklace should be Ugly, yet still function as a piece of jewelry.
2. Better designers will demonstrate a degree of control over achieving these ends.
3. Better designers will show a sense of how both the larger context within which the jewelry is worn, as well as the overall effects of the wearer wearing the piece, will increase the piece’s Ugliness.
4. Better designers will have an intuitive design sense; best designers will show some strategic control over the design process.

Then they went to work. They evaluated each Ugly Necklace according to 10 jewelry design criteria, and scored each criteria on a 1-10 scale of NOT AT ALL to VERY MUCH SO. All the judges’ scores were added up, and averaged. Each criterion was weighted equally. The 10 necklaces with the highest average scores were selected as our 10 semi-finalists.

The CBJA offers three jewelry design classes, taken in sequence. These classes review an extensive list of design criteria and their application to beadwork and jewelry design. From this list, ten particularly important criteria were chosen for use in this Contest. These 10 criteria were felt to be the most critical in design, and the most appropriate to use in this first year of judging. These criteria included things like the piece’s “Overall Hideousness,” “Materials Used,”, “Clasps and Support Systems”, “Color Rule Violations”, “Balance, Proportion and Distribution Rule Violations”, and “Rhythm, Focal Point, and Orientation Rule Violations”.

Ten Semi-Finalists were picked. They were asked to submit the actual necklaces to us, to be put on display at Be Dazzled Beads. We took 3 images of each one – a full frontal image, a close-up, and a close-up of the clasp assembly. We posted these images, along with the poems, on-line at the Land of Odds web-site (www.landofodds.com) so that visitors to the site could vote for the winner and runner up. The winner got a $992.93 shopping spree on the web-site; the runner-up got a $399.07 shopping spree on the web-site. Voting began May 6, 2003 and continued through July 14. The winner and runner-up were announced July 15, 2003.

About Land of Odds, Be Dazzled Beads, and The Center for Beadwork & Jewelry Arts
At Be Dazzled Beads in Nashville, Tennessee and at Land of Odds on-line, accessible from everywhere, you can find one of the country's largest selections of glass beads, seed beads, delicas, semi-precious stone beads, cords, chains, filigrees, sterling silver components, earring findings, pin findings, clasps, charms, stringing supplies and more.
Land of Odds and Be Dazzled Beads provide the supplies you need for designing jewelry, decorating clothing and costumes, or enhancing furnishings and decorative accessories. A visit with us on-line is a perfect opportunity to settle in with your computer, friends and family, have some fun, and indulge your shopping pleasures. Each wonderful and imaginative alcove in our on-line shop is chock full of interesting "what-is" and "how-to" information and insights, as well as great selections of merchandise.
Land of Odds was founded in 1980 as a shop where antique lamps and furniture were restored. We sculpted, detailed, painted, stained, carved, glued and did whatever it took to return an antique to its original beauty and luster. Over time, our skills evolved, and so did our medium. We opened a shop in downtown Nashville, selling a wide assortment of jewelry making supplies, gifts, jewelry, gourmet foods, and posters. In 1998, we decided to turn Land of Odds into an internet-only business, specializing in jewelry making supplies. We closed our downtown store, and opened Be Dazzled Beads 3 miles south of downtown Nashville.
Today, James Alfred Jones (James' signature name on his jewelry designs and lampwork beads) works with silver, bronze, copper, glass and semi-precious stones to create pins, earrings, bracelets, necklaces and objects d'art. You'll find James' studio in conjunction with Be Dazzled Beads in Nashville. Warren Feld manages the on-line and in-store operations for Land of Odds and Be Dazzled Beads.
We also operate a professional beadwork and jewelry making school called The Center for Beadwork & Jewelry Arts. We offer 80-100 classes each month in various disciplines, including beadwork, bead stringing, polymer clay, metal clay, wire work jewelry, silversmithing and lampwork bead making.
The public is always welcome to come by. And when you do, you might catch a glimpse of our dogs, Rosy and Dottie. They are so smart, and love to wait on customers when we're busy.