My R. A., Zoe, loves to make jewelry.
I asked her to teach me how to craft a piece of jewelry, and so we sat ourselves down in the middle of her dorm, bags and buckets of beads of every size, shape, and color spread around us.
"Jewelry-making runs in my family," she says. "My aunts get really into the history of the beads."
"These were my great-grandma's," Zoe says, holding up a handful of cork-stoppered vials of tiny glass beads. She fingers teal beads and says, "These are from the Czech Republic."
Zoe has beads from Hawaii, Peruvian seed-beads, and coral and turquoise beads she got from a Native American craft stand.
"In the nineties, my family went through a phase where they liked to make Fimo ("fee-mo") beads, which are made from a type of clay that you bake, and then it hardens."
She shows me a handful of black beads with yellow stars.
"And I don't even know where I found these," she says, holding up a bag of clay bird beads.
We decided to make an Anthropologie-esque bracelet, clamping the ends in a tight, metal spring to prevent the beads from falling off. I chose beutiful, smooth pale pink beads, and sparkling, faceted light green beads. Instead of stringing the beads in an "every-other-bead" color pattern, I opted for the green beads to comprise a half of the bracelet, and the pink beads to make up the other. It was really neat and artsy looking. Zoe told me that after I tied the stretchy string, I could hot-glue the ends to make it last even longer. The finished product was a super cute, artsy bracelet.
I've never been much of an artist, so I guess I never really understood how making bead necklaces could be so fulfilling. Yet, after reading Morgan's experience I see now that bead jewelry making requires a real eye for beauty. I mean look at all those beads, how is it possible to pick the best color that goes with another? There's no scientific method as in red must go with blue, or pink plus green equal disgusting, but making designing jewelry is based on the inner feelings and emotions that inspire beauty.
ReplyDeleteI think it's so interesting too, that what we value in art changes over the years, and that there has been jewelry around for thousands of years, in many different cultures, especially based on the materials on-hand in different regions of the world. We also seem to value a lot more the materials that are hard to come buy, and in ancient cultures were expensive to trade for, like emeralds from Egypt.
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