SPOTLIGHT ON ... DESIGNER
December 2005

Our featured designer for this month is Gary Helwig from the WigJig Company.

Gary got into making jewelry by a rather indirect route. He always liked to make things. One of his favorite classes in school was metal shop in middle-school, making things out of metal with a hammer and anvil. In another era, he would have wanted to become a blacksmith. When he was in the US Navy he got interested in making replica antique guns and clocks. He made his first two guns from a kit using a pocket knife and a screwdriver while deployed to the Mediterranean in an Aircraft Carrier. He also made his first clock on the same deployment. (Yes, you do have free time while you are deployed.) After leaving the Navy Gary became an engineer where he could design and make communications systems for the Saudi Navy, for the US Military, for hotels and for Internet companies. During this time, as a hobby, he made and sold hundreds of clocks and made a couple of replica guns.

Gary got into making jewelry not because he was interested in jewelry as a hobby, but because his mother was making jewelry. Marge Helwig was teaching how to make jewelry out of wire and beads and was making wire components by hand. She showed Gary her jewelry and he noticed that each piece was slightly different in size and shape. He suggested to his mother that he could make her a pattern, or jig, so that her wire components would be more consistent. Thus began the WigJig business, as Marge liked the patterns so much that she started a business making and selling the WigJig jewelry making jigs. Gary now holds three US patents for the WigJig tools.

When Marge passed away, Gary inherited a business that he knew little about. He had never made jewelry, only the tools for making jewelry. He received about 45 minutes of instructions in how to use hand tools and the WigJig tools from one of Marge's students and began by giving demonstrations on how the WigJig tools worked. Using his engineering background, he figured out how to use the tools to make many different wire components for jewelry.

At this time, Gary has been making jewelry for about 8 years. He is responsible for about 1/2 of the 2,000 pages of free jewelry designs shown on the WigJig web site. He develops a design idea, figures out how to make it, develops the step-by-step instructions on how to make the design, takes pictures of the design and publishes these instructions on the web site. People who talk to him when he is doing a demonstration, at a show, frequently notice his engineering approach to making jewelry. His goal in making a piece of jewelry is to make it so consistently that it looks like it was made by a machine. His strength is in making the wire components consistently in a variety of shapes. His weakness is in selecting colors. Most of Gary's jewelry has only one color, because like many men, he isn't good at picking colors that go together. Gary doesn't try to sell his jewelry, but you will notice that his wife and all his female relatives wear a lot of unique jewelry.