| WHO: | Cindy Bina of Natural Inspirations and Shawn Bina of Guild of the Gilded Hilt | ||
| BUSINESS TYPE: | Silver Jewelry and Fantasy Blade Artists | ||
| SIGNATURE PRODUCTS: | Northwoods-inspired hand-sculpted silver jewelry and acid-engraved fantasy weapons | ||
| WHERE:
SOCIALS: WEBSITE: |
Ely, MN
Natural Inspirations: Instagram and Facebook; Guild of the Gilded Hilt: YouTube and Facebook |
By Millie Frankel, Staff Writer at Meet the Minnesota Makers
Retirement is rarely dull for Shawn and Cindy Bina. In fact, I caught the couple during the three days they had at home in Ely, Minnesota in between stints at the Bristol Renaissance Fair, where they are vendors of Shawn’s acid-engraved fantasy blades and Cindy’s hand-sculpted silver jewelry.
When the Binas retired from their careers at Vermilion College- Shawn as a math professor-turned-provost, and Cindy as a mental health therapist for students– they both returned to passions they held in their youths. When she was in college, Cindy majored in art with a focus on pottery. After retirement, “I started looking for classes down in the Twin Cities, and I saw one that was called precious metal clay. I
had absolutely no idea what that was. I went down and took a weekend-long class, and just fell in love with it.”
Shawn is a lifelong self-described fantasy geek. As a kid in the 1970s, he played Dungeons and Dragons with his friends and spent hours drawing and writing about fantasy worlds. “When I was younger, I had these grand ideas of things I could do in the fantasy realm, and I had always thought about wanting to make fantasy weapons,” remembers Shawn. After retirement, he began to experiment. “I was just going to make a few things for myself, and then it became an addiction.”
Natural Inspiration: Cindy’s Silver Jewelry
Natural Inspiration is the name under which Cindy sells her jewelry when she’s not sharing a booth with Shawn. Her artwork is rooted in the nature of the Northwoods. “We live in the middle of the woods,” says Cindy. “There’s about 200 acres all around us. I’m looking out my window at deer and wildlife and the beauty of nature all of the time.”
Cindy’s designs are crafted using silver clay, which is made of 92% recycled silver particles suspended in 8% organic material and water, allowing Cindy to hand-sculpt each piece. When the clay is put into a jewelry kiln, the organic material burns off, leaving behind the pure silver design. “One of the things I love to do is go out and collect tiny
leaves or little wildflowers in the spring when they first start to bloom, and I can press them into that clay to make actual impressions of the botanicals themselves,” explains Cindy.
Along with the natural elements there is something fantastical and otherworldly about the curlicue embellishments and climbing vines of Cindy’s designs. “When we decided to start doing Renaissance festivals, I thought, what do I need to do to broaden my style?” She began to incorporate Art Nouveau elements to give the jewelry an elven feel and bringing her designs a uniquely fantastical Northwoods appeal.
Guild of The Gilded Hilt: Shawn’s Engraved Blades
Shawn, on the other hand, creates the worlds depicted on the blades entirely out of his own imagination. At sixteen years old, Shawn and his D & D friends dreamed up a fantasy gaming business called “Guild of the Gilded Hilt.” Shawn chose to name his current business in honor of that original dream.
Each blade is first a story that Shawn writes and includes with the finished blade, so the owner can appreciate the lore behind the weapon. Then Shawn begins work grinding a pre-made blade into his desired shape using a large grinder. But the most distinctive part of Shawn’s work is the engraving on the blade created through hand acid-etching. Acid etching is not a common practice in the United States, so Shawn turned to Kirill Runz, a Ukrainian artist, who taught him the craft over the internet. First, Shawn coats the blade in paint, then he
uses a needle to scrape the furthest layer of the background out of the paint. Then, Shawn dips the blade in acid, which eats away the part of the metal where the paint was scratched off. He repeats this with each layer of the drawing until it is completely engraved into the metal.
It’s an exacting process. “A really intricate piece goes through about twelve repeats of that process,” explains Shawn– and that doesn’t even include the hilt, sheath, and box in which it is contained, all of which Shawn makes by hand too. All in all, each blade takes about a month to complete.
The Loss of the Blueberry Festival
The small community of Ely is home to an outsized, active maker community. Each year Ely puts on an art walk, in which all of the businesses downtown display an artist’s work in their shop window. The Art Walk took place throughout September this year. “I think there’s usually about 50 artists that participate and they’re all local, which to me is just an incredible number,” shares Cindy. “It’s just such a supportive and encouraging artist community.”
The maker community took a hit this summer when wildfire smoke caused the cancellation of the biggest arts festival of the year. “The Blueberry Festival brings up to 40,000 people into town,” explains Cindy. “It’s my biggest festival. It probably is 20% of my annual income.” Those 40,000 people include vacationers from Chicago, Minneapolis and other cities across the Midwest, introducing Cindy to clients that return again and again for years to come. The festival also brings over 260 artist vendors into town, creating an opportunity for makers to connect with each other. “It was a good call to cancel it,” Cindy reflects. “It was during the scariest times of the fires. It was disappointing, but necessary.”
While The Blueberry Festival isn’t a major event for Guild of the Gilded Hilt, the wildfire smoke brought along concerns for Shawn as well. “We were about two miles from the evacuation zones,” says Shawn. They started packing up some of their things, which brought up questions they had never had to think about before: “Do we take all of our work with us? Do we just leave it here and risk it?” he remembers.
Yet, the community of Ely came together, with community members offering space for people and animals to stay if they needed a place outside of the evacuation zone, and firefighters came from all over the country to help put out the fires.
Working Together: Blades and Beguiling Jewelry
“I never thought of myself as an artist. I was a math professor,” reflects Shawn on his artistic journey. But recently this old belief is beginning to change. The immense amount of time, creativity, and effort that goes into crafting the blades means they each carry significance for Shawn. “I become really involved in it. I end up wanting to keep all of them,” he says. But what makes it worth it is being able to see how much his art impacts others as well. Recently, he was invited to take part in an art exhibition at Moore College in Philadelphia called Fantasy’s Spell: The Art of Enchantment, where he was one of thirteen artists representing the world of contemporary fantasy art.
Cindy also pours her heart into the jewelry she creates. Sometimes, it makes her question whether all the hard work is worth it. “There’s those days I wonder, am I just making shiny stuff for no reason at all?” However, she also finds purpose in creating work that holds significance to other people, particularly through commissions. She crafted moon pendants for a mother and her daughter, who was going
away to college. “At night their necklaces would remind them that when they looked outside, they were both looking at the same moon,” remembers Cindy.
It was a coincidence that Shawn and Cindy both fell in love with metalworking, but they’ve found ways to collaborate on their individual art forms. Often, they share a booth at festivals called “Blades and Beguiling Jewelry” and support each other while creating at home. “We use each other’s opinion all the time,” says Shawn. “Both of us are our own harshest critics, so it’s nice to have somebody else that you can trust to tell you that it’s going to be okay.”
Keep in Touch
Discover Shawn’s intricate fantasy blades and upcoming events at guildofthegildedhilt.com and follow along on YouTube and Facebook for a look into the etching process.
Order your own Northwoods silver jewelry at naturalinspirationcb.etsy.com, or find it in-store at Mealey’s Gift & Sauna Shop and Wintergreen Northern Wear in Ely.
Follow Natural Inspiration on Instagram and Facebook for a look
at Cindy’s new designs, and visit her at the Holiday Bazaar at the Landmark Center in St Paul, December 4-6.
Visit meettheminnesotamakers.com or follow @meettheminnesotamakers on Facebook and Instagram as well as Ambit and LinkedIn to discover the small business owners that make Minnesota an amazing place to be! Meet the Minnesota Makers is a news site that connects you to the local food, farms, artists and artisans that make Minnesota thrive.
