Featured Artist Nancy Raasch

Enjoy featured artist Nancy Raasch’s surprising collection of handcrafted jewelry. She talks about inspiration, ideas and her unusual materials.

 

 

Nancy Raasch is influenced by nature, repurposing and upcycling. Raasch designs and crafts her jewelry using unremarkable scraps of corrugated cardboard, green packing material, hand-made paper, hand felted paper, papier mache, cement, bits of wire and renders them into unexpected creative wear. Each piece is unique and is the clash of the mundane and precious.

 

 

She was born and raised in California and graduated from the University of California at Davis. Her career began as a book designer in Palo Alto, CA. A move to North Carolina in 1976, led her to use her creative talent designing and managing print advertising campaigns for national clients.

 

Raasch Design, a freelance graphic design firm was born in 1996. Since that time, she has created award winning Addy, PICA and Maxi campaigns for a myriad of clients.

 

 

Nancy reinvented herself as a jewelry designer in 2010, due to a stem cell transplant and a year long recovery. She has been dealing with metastatic breast cancer and multiple myeloma for 14 years. She decided it was time to “design” for herself.

 

 

Nancy’s interest in papers of all kinds as a jewelry medium fascinates her and is the basis of her jewelry collection. Raasch’s latest passion is Joomchi, the Korean art of mulberry paper-felting. There are so many possibilities to this medium and you are only limited by your imagination!

 

 

Raasch says, “I know that people don’t value paper much, but I hope to raise their expectations and bring out its beauty”.

 

 

She is a member of the American Craft Council and SNAG.