The Spencerville Fair 170th Anniversary Sterling Silver Trophy Belt Buckle Project
Hi there! I’m Alex—a jewelry designer, podcaster, writer, photographer, and working artist living along the St. Lawrence River in Southeastern Ontario. My friends call me alexd, and you can too. I’m a member of the Canadian Jewellers Association and Craft Ontario. From my riverside workshop, I create custom jewelry models in wax and plastics, which are cast into precious metals at our Toronto workshop and shipped to clients worldwide.
I’m honoured to be designing a sterling silver belt buckle for the Spencerville Agricultural Association, to be raffled at this year’s Spencerville Fair in support of their children’s programs.
This project means a lot to me, not just because it’s our local fair or its 170th anniversary, but because of that special building filled with artwork by kids and adults from across the region. When I first moved here, that building showed me I wasn’t alone—that artists live here too. After a much-travelled life, I know now: I’m finally home.
I’m excited to share the journey of this buckle—an object that brings together art, craftsmanship, and community. You’ll be able to follow the journey here, from the first sketch to the final piece. I’m documenting everything with photos, video, and time-lapse, and I’ll post updates right on this page. Bookmark it so you can check back easily.
Please also check out spencervillefair.ca and follow their updates.
And if you’d like to dig deeper, subscribe to my free weekly podcast, Cannabis Goldsmith, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Despite the name, it’s all about art and design, and it’s currently the #4 jewelry podcast in the world.
Hopefully, through this page (and the podcast), you’ll get a feel for how a local artist works, how jewelry comes to life, and how creativity connects us all.
Anyway, enough blabbering—let’s talk about pumpkins.
The Idea!
Everything starts with an idea, and as the great artist and filmmaker David Lynch often said: the idea is everything in art—the most important thing. He would talk about the idea with reverence. Here, we have a terrific idea to work with that represents the friendly vibe of the Spencerville Fair: the pumpkin.
To me, their pumpkin logo represents the agricultural component of the fair, the giant pumpkins you can see there, fall pumpkin pies, the pumpkins laying out in the fields awaiting Halloween, the seeds that represent the next generation of artists this fair is growing in our community.
How do we turn this logo into a Sterling Silver belt buckle?
Well, you might think we can 3D print it—but we won’t do that. Why? Because I think that wouldn’t be art, and it wouldn’t be good enough for what we want to achieve here: a representation of this excellent community-based fair. A fair filled with humans. A fair organized by a group of dedicated volunteers for 170 years. A fair where people meet and celebrate their community.
We will make it by hand because the vegetables are grown by hand, the quilts are made by hand, the flowers are arranged by hand, the old tractors and cars are restored and maintained by hand… You get what I am saying.
Fortunately, this is the only kind of jewelry we make here at TRIBE. Jewelry—like almost everything these days—is mostly made in faraway factories, robotically. We don’t want that. We want the opposite of that.
How Can We Make This?
A handmade belt buckle in precious metal like Sterling Silver is jewelry, and we can use jewelry techniques to make it. If you are a local blacksmith or carpenter in our area, you’ll get what I will do to make this piece. There will be some hammering!
My wonderful dentist, Doc Emma, uses similar small polishing tools and wears magnifiers on her eyes to see close-up—just like me—so if you are a dentist, you will get the process.
If you are a farmer or small businessperson, you will see that much of the work is in the advance planning and then in dealing with the unexpected—yet making it work somehow in the end.
If you restore old cars, you will understand finishes, trims, details, and how they all work together to create a single look.
If you are a kid who has too much imagination, you can imagine how you would make your own belt buckle out of plastic or metal—and what it would look like.
That is where we will go next.
Imagine A Design
The first thing that came to mind was the pumpkin in the middle of a rectangular piece of silver with rounded corners—or an oval shape. That’s it. Pretty basic, right? Look, I’m no Picasso and I can’t draw very well, but we have to start somewhere.
Go get a notebook (nothing fancy or expensive), write down or draw your ideas—because if you don’t, they will slip away (another nugget of wisdom from David Lynch). Put your idea on paper, for you mostly, but it is something you can show other people if you have to.
Here’s my original buckle idea:
What Are Western Style Trophy Belt Buckles, Anyway?
Well, for an important project like this, I look for books or experts in Western cowboy culture as it applies to jewelry or belt buckles. There is only one book on this subject at the moment: The Western Buckle: History, Art, Culture, Function by David R. Stoecklein – a 2003 hardcover filled with detailed photography and lore of Western-style trophy buckles. The book has some excellent photographic close-ups of a wide range of Western Trophy Belt Buckles to study. Some of them are very primitive looking, and others really complicated and loaded with engravings of swirly things on their front faces. Get this book if you want to see the western buckles treasured by collectors.
The book talks about the lore of how these buckles came to be made and treasured. It’s a tale that begins around the 1920s, because pants never had belt loops before that—they hadn’t been invented yet. Really! FACT: The Spencerville Fair is actually older than belt loops on pants. People used suspenders, buttons, rope!
But ordinary buckles (not on pants) have existed for hundreds of years—for things like horse harnesses and making your fancy shoes stand out while doing complex floor dancing in the royal palaces of olde Europe. Metal detectorists find old buckles all the time, and if you are a relic hunter, the book to get is Buckles 1250–1800 by Ross Whitehead – a 1996 illustrated guide with 800+ historical buckle examples.
How Fancy Belt Buckles Got Into Our Culture
Back to the story of big flashy belt buckles: a combination of early Navajo silversmith and Southern USA silversmith design found its way into buckles being offered up as trophies at rodeo events. Then (and this is important), Hollywood film costume designers in the mid-century started dressing their film cowboys with big silver belt buckles—which took big western buckle-wearing mainstream.
Because now, if you wanted to dress like a cowboy on Halloween or at a costume party, you had to wear cowboy boots, spurs, the hat, and a big belt buckle—just like they did in the movies.
The chain-smoking population of the last century grew to love the Marlboro Man because he dressed like a cowboy, wore chaps, rode horses across the fields toward you as the sun was setting in the full-page ad—back when people read magazines and watched TV. His big silver buckle glinted in many of the ads, broadcast again and again by millions of dollars in cigarette ad money. And so the Western buckle, so humble and authentic in its origin, became installed in our culture.
In the 1960s, large belt buckles took a funky turn and headed straight into fashion. Low-rise, hip-hugging jeans worn with huge belt buckles with no western themes started to be worn in the culture. Large buckle designs became more novel. You get stuff like guitar-shaped buckles and car-shaped buckles in the ’60s and ’70s.
To be continued…
