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OK taking it onto my own URL now - you can read here but I assure you the party's even bigger at www.redthreadarts.com

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Wow, I wrote that over a year ago.

What's new?

I am done with steriods, misery, and illness for now. There's no resting on the laurels of "whew that's over" with IBD, but I am doing very well. This is great for my social life, peachy for my sex life :) and terrible for the beading.

But I'm going to be posting some objects soon, eventually the balance between making stuff and not is not totally dependent on feeling miserable.



I began beading only about 6 months ago. My discovery of free-form peyote bracelets probably would not have been so life altering had it not concided with a diagnosis of Crohn's disease, 2 subsequent hospitalizations, months of meds, and a failure to regain my health again so far. What was a curiosity became my preferred medium over a string of months waiting for meds to work or not work, trying to recover, trying to be patient. Whatever kind of day I might be having, I can almost always manage to work on beads and enjoy doing so.

While beads are new to me, art is not. I have formal art training in sculpture, photo, video and drawing. If you had told me 8 years ago that I would be doing "craft" of any kind I would have told you you were crazy.

Here I am, disinterested in my paints and canvas and completely obsessed with size 11 chunks of glass with holes.

I learn more every day, try new techniques at a rate that scares my husband, and pay the area bead stores off before I do my MD's.

If there's a pony in there somewhere as regards this very stubborn and nasty illness, it's definitely my new found love affair with beading and the fact that it is something I can actually do at this time, and at most times. Beading has it all -- portability, flexibility, a calming, restorative, repetitive rhytm, and therapeutic nature.(Others obsessed with beads, chronically ill and also perfectly healthy, will probably agree.)

While illness and healing are the story behind how I found beading, I don't want my work to be looked at through some kind of art-therapeutic lens. I enjoy making jewelry that women want to wear, both my contemporaries and the type of woman I hope to become in the next decade - some pieces are playful, whimsical and retro-savvy, others are clean, sophisticated and resonant.

Marriage is love.

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