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Miller makes jewelry in the basement of a small boutique in St. Louis. She says it used to take her several hours to cut a single piece of metal into a pair of earrings. But now she can take her design drawings to a small fabricating shop that quickly cuts the pieces for her with a laser cutter.
She is one of a growing number of artists around the country taking advantage of new technologies. Jean Lee and her partner Dylan Davis are industrial designers in Seattle. Using a computer aided 3-D printer, they designed a ceramic bank shaped like a pig.
Even so, can independent artists who are spread out across the country compete with large manufacturers in places like East Asia where labor is so much cheaper?
Other artists, however, might be willing to work together to mass produce more low cost items. In fact Lee and Davis are already doing this on a small scale. They recently purchased a laser cutter for their workshop and occasionally cut material for other artists in Seattle. They said they would welcome an opportunity to offer this service through an open source system.
Or maybe it's simply another creative use of technology. Holekamp says in the end, it will be up to the market to decide.
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"And so what my aim is with craft commons is to break out of this idea of I designed something and so it belongs to me."
"The sky is the limit almost on what you can cut now with a laser or water jet," says Miller.
"How we have grown as a business is, anything I can get a jeweler's saw through, I'm gonna try and make jewelry out of," she says.