September Bead Journal Project -- Returning Home

I have finished my bead journal project for September.

The name of the piece is Returning Home -- it's about returning back to myself and my life after my Mom's illness and death. During my Mom's illness, I didn't really participate with myself -- if that makes any sense; I didn't exercise, read, stitch -- I only did things that I thought would bring my mother joy and/or comfort. It was an anxious time and, in many ways, I felt "outside of myself", like I didn't really live in my own body -- this piece is about coming back home to me and the things I love and having my Mom with me, inside my house.

Before my Mom's death, my house might have looked something like this pink cabana. A small pink beachhouse with a porch for stitching. (Photo courtesy of appyjumper1025.)

Now, my house if full of my Mom, the color aqua, and sea shells. My mother loved to collect shells and we spent many hours collecting, washing and categorizing each find.

I'll never forget what she said to me one day while we were washing our shells. She said, "Isn't it amazing, Suz, how an animal so small could create something so beautiful. Without their shells, these animals are insignificant, ugly even. But then they make themselves this beautiful home to live in. It's amazing." And it is.

Like the humble mollusk, Mom loved nothing more than creating beautiful spaces for those she loved. Her hobby was decorating and she was gifted in color and design. Just like the shells she loved to collect, her house was a beautiful place and it's where she spent most of her time. It's where she chose to die, inside her own shell.


In this picture, the shells on the right are called blue limpets and Mom loved them because they look fairly ordinary from the outside but when you turn them over, they display her favorite color. I used one of these shells as the bottom left "flower" on my beaded house.

Three other shells form the "flower" on the right side of the door. We collected these shells together the day my Mom bought a day trip on a Seashell Cruise for my husband's birthday.


My husband, like my Mom, loves to collect shells. The two of them were convinced that, if they went on a cruise to a remote island, there would be oodles and oodles of beautiful treasures since there were no people around to get them first.


Even Jack got in on the action.


When we first got to the island, they were so disappointed. There were no whelks, no nutmeg shells, no conchs that day. The only shells on the beach were cockles (which were very common) and lots of small translucent, pearly shells called jingle shells. I happen to love jingles but they are so delicate that they normally get crushed underfoot on the public beach. Here, there were hundreds. I mentioned how pretty I thought they would look displayed in a dish and Mom set about collecting as many as she could.

Mom thought shells were so beautiful that she would put them in her china closet next to her best crystal and tuck them into her jewelry drawer next to her finest gems. One day she came to my house and put this arrangement together with bits of lace and silk ribbon from my sewing table. It's now one of my favorite pictures.


I struggled with the background of my beaded house. I wanted the background to represent the "fog" and the otherworldliness I felt when my Mom became sick. How everything else became unimportant except for her -- how the rest of my life was put on hold or, in some cases, how life tended to go on around me but I was no longer a participant. I tried so many ways of trying to make a foggy backdrop for this piece -- beads, paint, glitter...nothing seemed to work. I added the pink "stars" as bits of myself poking through the fog but now I'm beginning to think that I don't need those either. I'll let them sit for a while and see if they grow on me. Someone left a comment last post and asked, "do you even need a background?" Two days ago I thought I did, now I think maybe not...

Robin Atkin's class is being held here in Baltimore this weekend with a two-day workshop Friday and Saturday and a lecture/beaded buttons class on Monday. I'll have lots of beading eye candy to share with you all then.