Talking Titanium with AppleGirlArt creator Katie Buttera

TMS Titanium caught up with Katie Buttera from www.applegirlart.com to chat about her cool Titanium art she is creating in Indiana. Katie is an amazing welder that creates jewelry and other items using Titanium. She uses parts from Top Fuel dragsters, Indy cars, and SuperCross bikes for the inner fillings of her designs, and makes each one unique. 

TMS Titanium - Tell us about how you got started…

Katie - "Growing up in a racing family my whole life my goal was to somehow get to stay in racing as an adult. My family was also VERY artistically inclined. As I got older and the ever-pressing college question came about, it was an easy decision: I wanted to get my art degree. It took me awhile to get there, but about the time I graduated with my Fine Arts Sculpture degree I started Apple Girl Art to fuse everything together."

TMS - How do you come up with the designs and many designs do you work on at once?

Katie - "Most of my designs come about from some combination of three factors. Is this something I want? Is this something someone would give to their mom? Or is it attached to a holiday?"

"I don't have a concrete structure to coming up with designs, but whenever new loads of junk show up I'm constantly looking at things and seeing something else and then just running with that. I'm very conscious whenever I'm out shopping how I can put my spin on something that people are already buying in the big stores. As a racer, tasteful racing décor is hard to come by. Most of it is super cheesy or not accurate at all and just not something a real racer would want. I like to make the tasteful décor that every racers wife would like to put out in the kitchen not just shove it in the man cave."

TMS - How much Titanium are you using?

Katie - "A lot of my junk comes from the Top Fuel teams here in Brownsburg, Indiana and more and more parts are Titanium for weight and strength. Currently I have three items that are available all the time that are made entirely of Titanium. I make a pencil holder that is made of valve retainers and valves. I also make a refrigerator magnet that is a Titanium heart shape filled with little parts. The first product I ever made that really took Apple Girl off was a wrench ring and a matching bracelet. After many years of success with that I decided to make a Titanium version of the set as well."

TMS - Can you talk about how TMS is helping?

Katie - "TMS is AWESOME. Anytime I have an idea and need some Titanium Todd (Harrison) is so quick to help me figure out what I need and get it headed my way super-fast so I can get my creative action flowing. All my Titanium material comes from TMS, I won't get it anywhere else!"

TMS - Have you always been artistic?

Katie - "Oh yeah. Both my great-grandmothers were artists, my mom's father was fabricator billet superstar John Buttera, my mom has the crafty touch, so my brother and I were raised around projects and doing crafts and making things instead of buying things. Basically, if I wasn't somehow artistic or creative I think I would've been thought to have been dropped off by the stork."

TMS - Can you talk about the benefits of using Titanium?

Katie - "Titanium is cool, plain and simple. Ha, I really like the pretty blue colors it turns when its heat treated. The light weight is a helpful benefit, for example when I was coming up with the idea for the magnet it was almost automatic that I decided it should be Titanium because then it wouldn't slip on the fridge from being too bulky. And the face people make when I say I can weld Titanium is always a fun one."

TMS - If you could make anything out of Titanium what would it be?

Katie – "I'm a big fan of things that don't make sense. It would be super fun to me to make something that looked SO HEAVY but then have the entire thing be made of Titanium and like lift it with one hand and mess with peoples brains."