Jane Penner remembers her father running the poppy fund for the Kitchener Legion when she was a child.
Now she designs poppy jewelry for the Royal Canadian Legion’s Poppy Store.
“As my sister said, it’s just too bad dad isn’t still around to see this or to hear it, because I think he’d be pretty happy,” Penner said. “So it did have a definite sort of tug of the heart strings.”
The Rockwood jewelry maker produces polymer clay poppy brooches, necklaces and earrings for the Poppy Store that are sold across the country.
“It feels unbelievable actually,” Penner said. “I still have to shake my head about it.”
The process began in March when Penner connected with Peter Underhill, director of supply for the Royal Canadian Legion, who was looking for a jewelry artist comfortable working with polymer clay.
“When I started looking at the designs … we wanted the petal shape and we wanted the centres … as botanically accurate as possible,” Underhill said. “The beauty of working with the clay as a medium is it allows for some of those beautiful fluid type shapes as well as the touch.
“It’s got a lovely soft velvet touch to it and the product has actually maintained some of its flexibility when it’s done.”
It took Penner about three weeks before she had a design she wanted to show Underhill. In the end she decided she wanted the overall feel to be that of a traditional Legion poppy.
“The process to get to the point where we came up with something that I liked and that they liked … was really an interesting process,” said Penner.
“Because in the past I might have something in my mind with clay … I’ll attempt it once or twice, maybe three times and if it doesn’t work out I just kind of give up and I’ll do something else.
“But with this I had a goal I was trying to get to, so I learned a lot in the process of getting to this stage … because I kept trying.”
Once the design was chosen, Penner had to work with various clays to come up with just the right red.
“I came up with a clay that I really liked the texture of and the feel of it, but the red was wrong, it was too cherry red,” she explained.
“So then I started mixing the orangey colour … with the cherry colour and that’s when we came up with this and I was really happy with it.”
Penner bakes the jewelry in a toaster oven on the second floor of her Rockwood home. She makes 16 at a time and it takes about three to four hours to complete.
By Oct. 3 she had completed about 600 brooches, 200 pairs of dangle earrings, 200 pairs of stud earrings and 200 necklaces.
“I don’t know if people really realize how handmade they are,” she said, explaining she manually conditions the clay, puts the texture on, cuts out the petal shapes and moulds them to her liking before forming them into the poppy shape, fastening the pin or jewelry hardware and baking the piece again.
“It takes a fair bit of time and it’s all very manual; it’s not like one great big stamp does a whole sheet of clay or anything like that,” she said. “It’s not like that at all.”
Underhill said he understands Penner is an individual artisan and plans out orders that she can feasibly complete.
Penner has already filled two orders and is working on a third.
Though the pieces feature the poppy, Underhill said they’re appropriate to be worn at all times of the year, not just around Remembrance Day.
“The intention here is not at all that this replaces the Remembrance poppy, the lapel poppy,” Underhill said.
“This is something that’s being done really just to promote it.”
The Poppy Store also features other poppy-inspired art and jewelry.
“We like our stuff to be made in Canada and consistently about 80% of … what we purchase is actually Canadian-made product,” Underhill explained.
Penner’s location also intrigued him.
“It’s interesting that Jane is also in the Guelph area, which is of course the birth place of John McCrae. But … something we’re really proud of is … promoting products that are Canadian-made. That helps people out there in the Canadian marketplace,” he explained.
Penner’s products are available at http://www.poppystore.legion.ca.
Underhill said the polymer clay poppy jewelry will likely be available at other retail locations, like the military Canex stores, in the near future.
