Individually hand carved granite beads with hand braided tan cord and complementary carved toggle fastening.

Length: 27inches

Weight 305g Number of beads: 49

Once highly valued for their precious materials and the painstaking effort required in their production, beads have been utilised as a form of currency in trade throughout history and unsurprisingly so. 

Carving a bead from rough rock is a work of love. A convex plane of carving is more difficult to accomplish freehand than a concave or linear form, especially when holding small objects. We fashion each bead in turn, slicing and then cubing the parent stone, cutting each corner from the rock, going over and over each piece multiple times, slicing and grinding until we are happy with the balance and curvature of the form. 

 Then the drilling begins. Again, we use no automated processes in the boring through these pieces. each is held by hand and a deep hole carved freehand before being bevelled to produce the bead ready for further shaping, sanding and polishing.

 Over half of the rocks we start to carve into beads don’t make it. A flaw is exposed in the grinding, or some issue occurs in the drilling or near the end in the sanding or polishing stages and we return the piece to the earth. Thankful for the stone we are blessed to carve and appreciative of the meditative repetition.

 From a material perspective, making beads is perhaps the most wasteful activity we put the Hebridean rock to in our practice, but somehow the pieces seem to gain something back through their association together. When strung they are more than the whittled down sum of their parts.  

 Our beads are not perfect spheres, perfection can be gained by using modern bead making machinery and rounding tools. Perfection is highly overrated. We like that each one can both sit alongside others comfortably and yet each has a character of its own which speaks of the laborious work it has emerged from.