Local Artist, Lucya Almeida, cashes in with Canadian mint

Submitted by Amy Terrill

Jewelry Artist Lucya Almeida, who works from her home studio in Bethany under the company name The TIMA Collection, has been designing jewelry for over 30 years but has just recently landed a unique opportunity to design pieces for The Canadian Mint.

Lucya works with many materials – silver, brass, stone, leather, beads, feathers – but specializes in copper including a line that uses Canadian pennies.  The pennies are manipulated in a variety of ways – soldered, hammered, dyed and drilled – to make beautiful earrings, bracelets, necklaces and belts. So when she was contacted last year by The Canadian Mint, she thought it was because she was breaking the rules around the treatment of the currency.  “I thought they were calling to sue me, to be honest,” says Lucya.

On the contrary, The Mint liked Lucya’s designs and wanted some for their own gift shops in Ottawa and Winnipeg, but without the same wide range of manipulations.  They requested four unique designs; Lucya delivered 15 and they bought up all of her samples! 

The opportunity has proven to be a financial and creative windfall for Lucya. Their preliminary order in October 2019 was the largest single order Lucia had received in her career and a month later they were already reordering.  The Mint has even sent her a special roll of 50 cent pieces that were released in 2019 and commissioned jewelry from them.

Furthermore, it came at the perfect time when Lucya was scaling back on wholesale contracts, which had begun to be unsatisfying.  Now with one solid wholesale contract, Lucya can spend more time being creative again with her work.

Is she worried about running out of pennies since they’re no longer produced by the Canadian Mint?  No way. When it was announced that they were going out of circulation she bought 60,000 of them, and has stocked up since on rolls in specific years to satisfy her customers’ custom orders.

I asked Lucya what her advice might be for an artist who is just beginning their career:

“I’m also a musician and there is this great philosophy in music that if you love and serve the music it will give back to you and I find that in art as well – if you love what you do and do what you love, it will take care of you.”