About

Hi! I'm Grace, the owner and designer behind Tsuga Beadwork.

About Grace

Tsuga is named for Tsuga canadensis, the Eastern Hemlock tree. I spent a significant part of my PhD studying it in the Lake Superior basin, where it grows in dense stands with incredible biodiversity. 

By day I'm a wildlife ecologist- field work, data, publications, the whole apparatus. The bead box has been running in parallel since high school, when a Christmas present brainstorm led me to the bead stash in the basement and I started tinkering with thread types and bead shapes instead of just stringing. That tinkering hasn't stopped in over 20 years.

Where the designs come from

I grew up in a deeply diverse community outside Chicago- the kind of place where you'd hear a dozen languages in one school hallway. That early exposure wasn't tourism; it was just the texture of daily life, and it made me genuinely curious about the breadth of human material culture. The jewelry is the long-term result of that curiosity.

Designs come from research: Mesopotamian cylinder seals, Mughal jaali screens, Pazyryk burial textiles, Bedouin jewelry traditions, Mediterranean mosaics, the architecture of ancient universities. Museum rabbit holes, mostly. The goal is to draw from many traditions without copying any single one- fusion in the way that fusion cuisine works, pulling from multiple sources to make something that's its own thing.

I've lived in a lot of places for the science : Chicago, the Lake Superior basin for 15 years, and now New Mexico. The geography shows up in the work.

How I work

I approach a new design the way I'd approach a hypothesis. Sometimes it's supported by the evidence- the palette works, the structure holds, the piece does what I expected. Sometimes it's completely off base and it's back to the drawing board. The process is iterative either way.

Materials are gemstones, Czech seed beads, and glass beads. I use metal only for clasps and earring hooks; all bracelets are metal-free. Necklace lengths are adjustable at no charge.

Jewelry ships in drawstring pouches made from repurposed clothing. I'm a wildlife ecologist; 'm not going to pretend textiles don't have an environmental cost, and I seek to curtail textile waste this way. 

What you end up with

Pieces designed to look like they came from somewhere. Not bought – collected.