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Knives to jewelry Paul Bickford Northern News Services Published Monday, October 24, 2011
In the mid-1990s, he began making pocket-sized knives to sell to tourists visiting Fort Smith. "I made close to a hundred of these little things," he noted. "I sold just about every one of them." Eventually, he started making larger knives. "The knives got pretty big," he said. "They got to about two-feet long. That's about when I stopped." In the 1998-99 school year, Freund studied at the jewelry metal work program at Nunavut Arctic College in Iqaluit, where he learned how to join metals. His decision to go to college was to learn how to make better knives. "I came back and I was making jewelry, and jewelry sold better than knives," he said. Since then, he has made hundreds of pieces of jewelry, but maybe only 10 knives. However, Freund, 53, has been on a bit of a hiatus from jewelry making for about a year, while his new house is being built in the Bell Rock area of Fort Smith. That's partially because he does not yet have a place to work on the craft in the house. In the last year, he said he has completed one new piece of jewelry. Once his house is completed, he plans to return to making jewelry within the next year. Currently, he is on disability because of problems with his knees, as the result of a bicycle accident when he was about 14 and the removal of cartilage when he was 18. "It deteriorated over the years and they're sore enough now that I can hardly walk," he said, noting he is also waiting for knee surgery. Freund, who is of Metis heritage and grew up in Fort Smith, is a carpenter by trade. "I'm still a carpenter even today, but my knees are shot and I'm not really doing a lot of it anymore," he said. Freund noted he never made a living from making and selling jewelry. "I made a part of a living, maybe. I could never make a full living off of it." When he was making jewelry, his work would include earrings, broaches and rings. Most of the work would be made of copper, although he also used silver and gold. "Nobody wants gold. They hardly want silver. The silver stuff will sit in the tray for months," he said. Freund is not sure why people don't seem to want to buy silver and gold items. "Maybe it's too flashy. Maybe there are too many thieves around. I don't know," he said. "People just don't seem to want to buy anything with any value. They like copper. They'll pay the same price for copper as they would for a piece of silver." Freund said he enjoys working on jewelry, everything from designing it to doing all the work. "I try to make each piece look as northern as possible somehow, either by a picture of something on it, a northern animal or the shape of a flower or something that's nearby us," he said. "I've made everything from bears to snakes to foxes."
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