helen dietze Remembered

On August 5th, 2018 the Bead Society of Northern California held a special seminar on our 41st anniversary. This was to celebrate and remember a long-time member helen dietze. Gretchen Schueller, Julie Wuest and Maarcia Harmon all brought their collection of necklaces and items that helen had created over the many years that they had known this fabulous artist.

Gretchen Schueller spoke first, talking about how she first met helen in 1986 when her mother signed her up for a special class. Beading under helen’s tutelage was not the normal a-b-c but totally opened Gretchen’s young eyes to becoming creative in her own mind showing her how to incorporate esthetics as well as history in her pieces.

Somebody asked her “Why she would create such a detailed, fancy necklace”. Helen’s answer was another question; “Why do you wear a pretty black lace bra?” Because it makes you feel good! Helen stressed to always wear one of your creations even when going to buy gasoline. It makes you feel good when people go crazy and admire what you have made.

Helen put together a booklet all about the various necklaces that she had created over the years as well as personal comments from people who knew and admired her and a brief history of her life in order to share her work with as many people as possible.

She started as a fiber artist spinning and dying the base fabrics into yarn. She took those yarns and worked them up with crochet, looming, and knitting ~ rarely following a pattern but letting the strands tell her where they wanted to go. Fiber people stopped her just to pet the yards she had developed as they were certainly not the normal yarns found in any yarn shop.

She attended the Rudolf Schafer School of Design where she learned the Prismatic Color Wheel. This wheel deals in transparencies and not the normal red-blue-yellow color wheel most artists work with.

At one stage, she crocheted an pair of gloves and added a few beads for adornment….then more and more beads found their way into her fiber works of art. They started to take over….until there was fiber in her bead work.

Throughout her years, helen traveled throughout the world and explored its many cultures. She would purchase whatever caught her eye from plastic beads, stone, bone, metal, antique and new ~ it never mattered. She would find a place for each of her treasures in her creations. She was especially mindful of the world situation. If two countries couldn’t get along on a daily basis due to politics, then she would place beads from those countries next to each other in her necklaces. She was a true ambassador and even had one of her necklaces given that name. The pieces each had history, they meant something special to her and she tried to achieve world harmony through their creation.

helen often submitted her necklaces to bead shows and surprised her friends when she enjoyed the “rejection” notices that she received back. Her pieces were TOO different and was often asked, “Are you wearing that necklace or is that necklace wearing you?”

Marcia Harmon spoke next about how she had met helen in 1992 through the bead society (then NCBS). “Her presence in the room was a magnet. helen was grand, clearly a mentor, a role model, and her spirit was elevated off the ground. helen was always dressed to the nine’s and people who passed around her knew she was ‘someone special’ but “who”?? She empowered all of the women around her with stories, wisdom and spiritual nature.” Bead snobs went crazy as she would as easily have a placed a plastic leaf next to a 2,000-yearold bead, but with helen’s artistry ~ it worked. She loved to go to thrift stores and cannibalize the broken jewelry she found.

She held classes at the Adobe located in the Castro Valley Community Center for $5. Her ancient Subaru was constantly STUFFED with every possible bead, bobble, basket, fabrics, groupings, clusters of stuff all organized by a color story. She taught how to weave a story into your beadwork. She freely gave any of those pieces away to her students to help them expand their creations.

Marcia also helped her to sell a few items that she was ready to part with and at prices far below what they were actually worth. Before Gretchen, Marcia, and Julie even knew her, helen learned that one woman had actually cut apart a necklace she had sold to her to ‘use the beads’ when the husband told her that he hated it. That was the end of that!
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You had to be in her home to realize the depth and breathe of her vast collections: helen didn’t cook, so the kitchen, the stove, refrigerator all were full, racks of jars were full of rocks, beads, buttons, collected treasures were all around the house hanging from windows and doors. She collected treasures and lost souls, as well as shells, sticks, flowers ~ all could find their way into one of her many necklaces.

Marcia also helped the family to organize and liquidate helen’s estate. There were items that helen had collected dating back to the 1940’s and beyond. helen was also an artist and had watercolor paintings all around her home from the 1930’s of scenes and vignettes from the San Francisco Bay area. She was the end of her family line and as such, held tight to the artifacts in her home as I am sure she felt that they and her friends were her chosen family.

Julie spoke third. She wandered into a bead store in San Mateo where helen was teaching a class on the Ambassador Necklace. It created a pivotable change in her life. The necklace that Julie created after taking that class was accepted into the first Bead Dreams contest and won first prize. She spoke about how helen had traveled throughout the world three times and constantly made “things” to give away to people she met. She had a special way of making a knot – add a bead – make a knot – add a bead and it turned into something magical.

Different people took care of helen and drove her any where she needed to go. She had never seen a glass bead being made and since Julie owned Leopard Heart Glass, she sat helen down and showed her the various steps involved in creating the glass beads that helen had used over the years. One of the focal beads that helen got from Julie she put into her next necklace, but backwards. Julie never told her. Perhaps helen saw something in the other aspect of that bead that Julie was not aware of. That bead exchange became, “trading palominos”. The palomino horse was so rare and revered that they were only exchanged in a trade and never purchased by the horses’ owners.

The comment that brought the most laughter was when Julie told about helen seeing something she did not like and said, “Oh, that’s so Doggy Diner”. Obviously helen’s rendition of a total put down.

helen was 83 when she died in 2003. Always secretive of her age, when she was checked into the hospital her sister Violet wrote “28” on the age line.

Her will stated that everyone who had helped her throughout the years be allowed to pick ONE item. The balance of her estate was sold to finance someone to go to art school. All pieces were sold except for two ~ one had a magical story involving an African bead that found its way home. The other necklace was shown by Gretchen.

At many times during the presentation there were hugs and smiles and even tears. The Oakland Museum owns two of her pieces but they are currently in storage. There had always been a mystery about where an entire stack of helen’s necklaces had disappeared after her death and that secret was disclosed to everyone at the meeting. Everyone was so happy as this meant those pieces had “stayed in the family”.

Julie also spoke about helen’s rejection notices and how happy helen was ~ even keeping them to show to others. “If you are happy with what you have created, it doesn’t matter”.   At the end, Vivian, another friend of helen’s spoke about meeting her at a Pow-Wow held in 1977 at the Mormon church. helen was always a mystery to everyone who saw her until  they met her, and Vivian even wore one of the multi-colored multi-yarned freeform “sweaters” that helen had crocheted that had one sleeve and a mystery closure designed into the body. helen taught her how to blend in things that she owned and to not worry about what others thought. Items exchanged were reciprocated and thought of as “principles operate unspent”….

Everyone came together to celebrate and remember helen dietze and we could just hear her saying, “and that was me…..”

by marilyn peters