A southwestern Iowa artist will be featured this month on one of cable T-V’s top-rated afternoon shows. Thirty-six-year-old Darcy Horn of Red Oak will appear on “That’s Clever” on H-G-T-V. Horn says the television crew shot in her home studio for eight hours to capture enough footage for an eight-minute segment as she creates a bead-embroidered heart pendant.
She says she designed the pin specifically for the show as she’d seen several episodes and its website and no one had tackled this sort of art in this form. Horn makes a three-inch heart out of polymer clay first, affixes a leather piece, then attaches individual beads by hand-sewing them. The process takes about five hours. She says she was a little apprehensive about doing the TV show as she doesn’t even like having her picture taken, let alone having a video camera in her face for an entire day.
Horn says, laughing, “They try to make the artists appear a little zany and I’m really not that way. I’m not a typical artist, as far as, I show up on time for appointments and things like that. On the show, they tend to make people look a little goofy.” She says she’s confident she –and her crafts– will come out looking good on the October 17th program.
She plans to watch the show at her brother’s house since she doesn’t own a television. If she gets some business out of it, great, but Horn says she has other motivations. She says “What I’m hoping for mostly is that people will get interested in doing bead weaving and doing polymer clay. These are projects that take time to do and I don’t find very many people anymore than want to take the time to actually make something.”
Horn teaches bead weaving at the Shenandoah and Clarinda campuses of Western Iowa Community College. To see her work, surf to “www.thejadedog.com”.