About DK Design
the woman behind
DK Design
Silversmith & Textile Artist
Drew Kleinhen
Hello, I'm Drew, & thank you so much for visiting my website & supporting my art. I am the working hands & mastermind behind DK Design Jewelry + Textiles Art Studio.
I graduated from Kent State University with a BFA in Jewelry/Metals/Enameling in 2014. Soon after graduating I moved to Nashville, Tennessee where I worked for three different jewelry designers doing production work & assisting with design. On weekends, I would create hand-dyed & hand-painted textiles in my one bedroom apartment. It was a tight squeeze but it was the perfect way to unwind after a long week & keep my creative juices flowing.
At the beginning of 2018, I moved back to Northwest Ohio to blend my two passions into one, DK Design: Jewelry + Textiles Studio. The shop is located in an old, beautifully refurbished barn, where I can do both metalwork & fiber art all under one roof.
DK Design is a one-woman run
jewelry + textiles studio
focused on one-of-a-kind pieces.
inspiration behind the brand
youthful curiosities blossomed into adult passions
Jewelry
I began falling in love with jewelry at an early age, playing dress-up in the jewelry boxes of both my grandmothers. I always enjoyed being adorned from head-to-toe in anything from large costume jewelry to delicate silver chains. In high school I began to work predominantly in 3d forms by way of ceramics. I had a deep appreciation for process + detail & knew I wanted to pursue art as a career. It wasn't until right before college that I found metalsmithing & took a chance on a new art medium. The minute I knew fire was involved to be a metalsmith, I was hooked.
I am largely inspired by Native American Silversmith Jewelry for its bold use of stamping, gorgeous cuts of natural turquoise & beautifully polished silver.
Nature
I am the daughter of a florist & a farmer, so in our family, nature is everything. As a child, Sunday afternoons consisted of family & nature. We would take these days to search for arrowheads & interesting rocks in the freshly worked ground or find beautiful flowers in the woods around our home. We would sometimes take the flowers we found & press them into books or hammer them into fabric. Other times my sister & I would collect fallen petals from flowers in my mother's floral shop & create our own "potpourri". This essence of using nature to create art is mimicked today in the way I generate dye baths & choose stones for a collection. It's funny to see how my youthful curiosities have blossomed into my adult passions.
Jewelry
All of the Silversmith Jewelry at DK Design are created from scratch in house. Each item is hand sawed, drilled, hammered, filed, shaped, soldered, buffed & polished from either sterling silver sheet metal & wire. I hand pick each natural stone & hand-make each bezel the stone resides in. I am inspired by natural stones like White Buffalo, Crazy Lace Agate & any thing in the Jasper family.
I love the whole process from start (designing, concept, choosing a stone, arranging) to finish (soldering, assembling, polishing). This is truly a one woman show & as such, I wear many hats. The same two hands design, create, photograph & ship each piece. Great jewelry takes time & a lot of patience.
Textiles
At DK Design, I use traditional
dyeing methods such as Shibori resist dyeing method
& color discharge (the stripping back of color).
When creating dye baths, I tend to concentrate on the build up of color in a single dye bath. No two scarves or textiles are the same.
I recently have been focusing more on the natural dye process; where I use items around the region to generate dyeable colors. Some dyes take minutes to achieve or weeks. The process of extracting dye from natural items takes time & is a true labor of love. Given the change of seasons, the options for color are continually changing & I am always on the lookout for more items to dye with.
small scale, mostly seasonal,
dye baths produced from :
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indigo
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walnut
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eucalyptus
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avocado
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madder root
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nettle
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osage orange
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sandalwood
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goldenrod
