It's Day 7 of March Meet The Maker and the theme is: How And Why.

The ‘how’ is simple: I make all my beadwork one bead at a time.

It can easily take me 30 or even 100 hours to make a piece of jewellery and that can be spread over days, weeks, months or even years and sometimes it can be tough to see a piece through to the end.

As to the ‘why’ - that's a bit harder to explain.

I played with beads when I was a child but 15 years ago I came across a beading kit to make this amulet purse and never looked back.

There are many reasons I bead (I love it, it's my job, it makes sense to me) but Onye Ndika put it best when she wrote to me many years ago:
"I believe that what makes us artists is that we are passionate about birthing beauty from the works of our hands. Whether it's beaded/ metal/ plastic/ recycled/etc. jewelry, paintings, wood-carvings, sculpted styrofoam... I just don't think it matters.
What drives us to create these things is a fire that burns in the heat of summer all the way through the cold of winter, threatens to consume us if we don't USE it, and if the fire goes out (because the issues of 'life - coming at us, fast' or what have you), we are cold, miserable and jaded.'

Her wise words and the phrase 'birthing beauty' never left me and what she says sums up the why.

Sadly though at the moment I'm not getting much beadwork done. I stupidly fell down some stairs the other week and whilst the lumps and bruises are beginning to disappear I've come to realise that I may have fractured my thumb rather than just badly knock it. So frustratingly my beading plans for this month are pretty much on hold.