CENTERVILLE —
Where some people see old junk, Savannah Drake sees vintage beauty.
Drake, 19, uses her eye for the best of the past to find vintage materials for her crafts. She turns them into beautiful objects for her friends and family to place in their homes.
“My favorite part about my hobby is that I can literally use ANYTHING that most people would throw away,” Drake wrote in a blog post about her crafting style.
Drake’s love for decades past is evident in her decorating. She keeps framed photographs of her grandparents on the walls of a room that features lace, pearls, peacock feathers, and soft pink and gray tones.
She said she was inspired in her crafting by her art teacher at Centerville High School, Tatum Marcussen, because she let students try what they wanted. When she was making a memory board for class, Drake experimented with incorporating vintage paper into the project. Now, she uses vintage paper from books, sheet music, newspapers and maps in many of her projects.
Drake, who works at Kid’s World as a preschool aide and runs the after-school program, recently found inspiration there. When she was making tissue-paper flowers with the children, she realized she could also make the flowers from vintage paper.
She spent a day treating paper, making paper flowers and decorating a lampshade with them. She then added buttons in the centers of the flowers. She liked the way the lamp looked, so she put a picture of it on Facebook.
Drake said she was surprised when the picture got 40 “likes” right away and several people asked how she made the lampshade.
“I guess I didn’t realize the stuff I like to do, people would like to have in their house just as much as I would like to have it in my house,” Drake said.
Drake said she thinks she likes to work with lamps because she prefers three-dimensional projects to two-dimensional ones. She also does two-dimensional paintings, but she said the temptation to add three-dimensional effects like buttons and ribbons is difficult to resist.
Drake is considering making more of the lamps and selling them. She said she could take requests, such as using a lamp someone already owned or using paper provided by a client. Drake said anyone interested in a lampshade can contact her by cell phone at (641) 895-2303 or send her a message on Facebook.
Up until now, Drake has not sold her crafts, but she said she really enjoys giving crafts as gifts. For example, she once made a lampshade for her mother, Jeri Pershy, that featured baby pictures of her and her siblings. Drake decorated the top of the shade with a quotation from the children’s book “Love You Forever,” written by Robert Munsch and illustrated by Sheila McGraw, because Pershy often read that book to her children. Drake decorated the rest of the shade with vintage paper and buttons.
“Anything that I make for someone else is going to be one of my favorite things that I made because there was a lot of thought behind it,” she said.
In fact, Drake said the most difficult thing she has ever made was a painting for her stepfather, Tyson Pershy. Because of his love of Florida State University athletics, she made him a painting of the profile of a Seminole warrior that Florida State uses as a logo.
She is currently working on a painting to hang in the new office of her sister Riley Drake, 24, who just graduated from Drake University with a master’s degree in school counseling. On Jan. 2, Riley started a job as a school counselor at Abbie Sawyer Elementary School in Ames.
Drake said she finds her materials in various places, like garage sales and antique shops. Lately, one of the best places for her to look has been in a house that her mother recently purchased on an adjoining property. Drake said the house was still filled with the belongings of two women who used to live there. She recovered old books, picture frames, newspapers, records and license plates from the house.
“I told my mom it’s like my own personal treasure chest,” Drake said. “It provided an entire new outlet for things I would have had to pay for.”
For example, she said she hopes to use an old suitcase she found in the house to make a chair. She got the idea from a similar project she saw online.
Drake, who will finish a two-year degree at Indian Hills in May, said she plans to continue her studies at Iowa State University in either agricultural studies or early childhood education. Either way, she will continue repurposing beautiful old materials and encouraging others to do the same.
“I think there’s so much creativity,” Drake said. “People say they could never do something like that, but with patience and creativity you could make anything you could dream.”
People
Related Photos
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Making tissue-paper flowers with children at Kid’s World inspired Savannah Drake to create this flower lampshade made from vintage paper and buttons. Photo by Brooke Sherrard/Daily Iowegian
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Savannah Drake made this lampshade for her mother. It features baby pictures of her and her siblings, vintage paper, buttons and a quotation from a children’s book that Drake’s mother used to read to them. Photo by Brooke Sherrard/Daily Iowegian
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Savannah Drake first became interested in crafting with vintage paper when she made the memory board behind her in a high school art class. Her eye for vintage materials is demonstrated in her choice of couch: she noticed the psychiatrist’s couch she is sitting on buried under years’ worth of inventory in a secondhand shop. She said it took her a while to dig it out, but it only cost her $15. Photo by Brooke Sherrard/Daily Iowegian
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Crafter repurposes vintage materials
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