Crafting a Creative Christmas : The Spangles of ‘Dangles’ Transform the Sparkle of Holiday Decorations

It’s boom time for many South Bay artists, especially crafts people and others whose works make good Christmas gifts or decorations.

Maudette M. Ball, executive director of the Palos Verdes Community Arts Assn., calls the holidays an “everybody wins” time: Artists get a market for their work, and buyers get “something that is made by the human hand.”

Times staff writer Gerald Faris takes a look at what some of those hands have been doing this holiday season.

Portia Spurney calls them “dangles”--miniature mobiles made of beads and rhinestones suspended on wires. “You can use them on a package, pin them in your hair, or wear them over your ear or off a hatband.”

At holiday time, they do just fine as ornaments, and Spurney has used them to transform a manzanita root into a Christmas tree in her San Pedro apartment, which doubles as a studio.

She also has collected different kinds of vines and ivy and has woven them into small Christmas wreaths, intertwining them with lace, ribbons and dried flowers.

“I do a lot with found items,” she said. “That is part of the fun of using things you see around you, making them into new things.”

Her dangles contain beads she has collected from around the world--silver, pink, green and gold--along with gold and silk cords.

Spurney began doing seasonal art when she was in high school. “I’ve always done my own Christmas cards and ornaments,” she said.

Aside from her work as an artist and costume and interior designer, Spurney teaches people to make what she calls “wearable art.” She also tries to make her students as passionate about the creative possibilities of castoffs as she is.

“I encourage them to use things they have had in drawers for years and don’t know what to do with,” she said.

What do people bring in? Carved ivory “that grandpa brought back from the Orient,” broken beads, shells, and pieces of old brooches and earrings. “I show them how to put them into necklaces, earrings, hair pins--and dangles.”

The only limit on what can be done with such things “is your own inventiveness.”