It takes Bill Metz about four hours to make a starburst-shaped wedding cake pan.
That's time well spent as far as the only traditional tinsmith in the Amana Colonies is concerned.
He's not just making a pan, he's helping preserve a craft that otherwise might be lost.
With a few modern adjustments like an electric soldering iron - instead of rods heated in a fire - he works with tools passed down from the Colony's original tinsmith workshops.
'It's a part of our history,” he says. 'We try to make some of the crafts that were prevalent in our old Amana community.”
The star cake pans are his most popular item. He's made more than 300 of them. They are part of Amana tradition, but he's never seen them for sale in any commercial store. He hopes there is always someone around to make the uniquely shaped pans used for weddings and other special occasions.
But he worries that may not always be the case. Metz and other keepers and advocates of Amana arts and crafts worry that their traditions won't live beyond the current generation, which is aging.
'We're having a harder and harder time finding people that do these things,” says Deborah Hawkes, director of the Amana Arts Guild.
The Guild, formed in 1978, works to support traditional arts and crafts in the Amana Colonies - the seven Eastern Iowa villages built by a German religious sect in 1855. The organization holds classes, hosts artisan workshops and runs a museum and a gift store stocked with locally-made traditional crafts. Hawkes says filling the shelves has grown more difficult in recent years.
'I've been in this job about five years,” she says. 'Just in those years, the number of folks who are willing to do these things and are willing to learn how to do them has declined.”
Many of the guild artisans are aging. Metz, for example is 80. While healthy and energetic now, he acknowledges he won't be forever.
'We have to find somebody to do this, because you never know when I'm going to expire,” he says with a laugh. 'When age creeps up on a guy, you have to teach somebody else or it will be lost.”
The guild has a single potter and only two weavers - one is Hawkes. They no longer have a cooper - a person who creates wooden barrels and casks.
There are plenty of restaurants, bakeries and art shops in the Amanas to keep tourists coming to the region for years to come. But it is the specifically traditional artisans, doing things in the style and way their German-speaking ancestors did, that Hawkes worries about losing.
'Losing them, we're losing their knowledge,” she says. 'The crafts will die out if nobody keeps them going.”
She attributes the decline in interest to modern, busy lifestyles.
'Everybody has full time jobs and children. There are less stay at home moms,” she says. 'It's just harder.”
That doesn't mean no one is willing to learn. The guild recently found someone to take over Amana-style quilting, which differs from the patchwork quilts found elsewhere. The Arts Guild sponsors apprenticeships and offers public classes to drum up interest. In the fall they're planning a tatting class to teach lace making.
Some things like crocheting and woodworking are easier to keep going. They often don't require as much of a time commitment or as much heavy equipment of the type that fills Metz's basement workshop.
The workshop is part of a Middle Amana house built in 1868 that housed his parents and his grandparents before him. The building served as a kitchen house for several families before the village residents abandoned their communal living style in the 1930s.
The tinsmith says he thinks it would take a few years to teach someone all he knows about his craft. Learning the technique was a natural extension of skills he already had due to a career as a sheet metal worker at the Quaker Oats factory in Cedar Rapids. At the time, there was no tinsmith in the Amanas - the last workshop closed in Homestead in 1941. When the guild asked if Metz would consider learning, he said yes. He's held the mantle of the community's only tinsmith for over 30 years. He says he's had a couple of people start to learn over the years before they gave it up, usually, he says, because tinsmithing is a lot of work without much of an economic payoff.
He is hopeful a new apprentice slated to start this spring will be the person to carry on the tradition.
Hawkes is hopeful about the prospective apprentice too. She hopes that even if the guild is always finding just one more person, one craft at a time, to carry on, they can keep the traditions going.
'We're trying to keep our traditional Amana folk arts alive,” she says. 'I think our heritage is important here in the Amana Colonies.”
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