About Me

As a start, I'm a jewellery designer, aspiring anyway. I started making jewellery a couple of years ago and discovered a technique for creating a beaded mount around a stone. I'd always wanted to make jewellery  but found the skill level and equipment required beyond me. This seemed to offer a way to create jewellery without all that expensive equipment, plus I had a small collection of vintage beads acquired over years, some from old aunts and other family and some I'd bought. I love the way the beads look in a hank but never really liked beaded jewellery, I also had this 'once they're gone they're gone' feeling about the old beads which made me reluctant to use them.

this is a hank of my favourite beads. I think they're Czech, but I'm not sure. They are really beautiful and I used to just get them out to look every now and then.
Whenever I saw old beads on a market stall or in a charity shop I bought them.
In 2004 we, my husband and I, moved to Devon. I have a degree in graphic design and wanted to be an illustrator, I have done a little paid illustration work, but when I say a little I mean really a little, about 4 jobs, and 3 of them for the same company. I thought that moving to a beautiful place might inspire me to create more artwork. My husband had bought a small tourist attraction in a really beautiful village called Lynmouth.

We sold up our house in Hertfordshire, near London, and moved to a tiny cottage on the coast. My job, as the manager of a small arts centre, had disappeared which seemed to be a sign that this was the right thing to do. Unfortunately the tourist business in Lynmouth is gradually falling off, and our business was making less money every year. I took a job in a local library to help make ends meet.
Of course a library has lots of books and I found some about beading, to begin with a book on brick stitch, and then the fabulous Beading with Cabochons by Jamie Cloud Eakin. I found my medium, I started with some little cabochons I bought from my local craft shop for a few pence. I took my first ever piece to work and sold it, in fact I could have sold it twice over. I made a second one and sold it then made a third as a commission. I was a jewellery designer!
I had always collected sea glass when ever I saw it but never really knew what to do with it.

A piece of white glass in a rock pool on Ilfracombe beach, where I found it.A typical piece of my jewellery.

Suddenly it dawned on me that I could adapt this technique to bead around sea glass. I'm a bit slow on the uptake! My first piece was fairly successful  and I've never looked back, I'm always looking for new ideas and hopefully I'm getting better at it. I also do a bit of wire wrapping around some of the more perfect pieces of glass:
I make little bit of silver clay work, I've made some charms for special sea glass pieces and some complete pieces of jewellery. I need to learn more about the techniques though as I make a lot of mistakes.

My first piece of silver clay jewellery

Well that's me in a largish nutshell, obviously there are years of other stuff leading to here, but you don't want my whole life story!