About
Hi. I'm Grace, the designer behind Tsuga Beadwork.
Tsuga is named for Tsuga canadensis, the Eastern Hemlock. I spent a significant part of my PhD studying it in the Lake Superior basin, where it grows in dense stands with extraordinary biodiversity. Quiet, structural, older than it looks. That felt right for the work.
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 basement bead stash and I started tinkering with thread types and bead shapes instead of just stringing. That tinkering hasn't stopped in over 20 years. It also hasn't stayed simple.
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.
My family added another layer. My mother's side are Polska Roma immigrants who moved through Sweden before settling in Chicagoland. My grandfather on my dad's side was an engineering PhD student from Baroda, India, who met my Welsh grandmother from Boston while he was at MIT. I grew up eating Ladavan's lad na, Sergio's mole, Ahmed's dolmades, and Carmella's cubaneh, and understanding the traditions behind all of them.
I also happen to look ambiguously global. Without knowing my name, people have guessed my ethnicity as everything except Sub-Saharan African and East Asian. In junior high, a girl I didn't know walked up and spoke to me in Russian, miffed when I couldn't respond in kind. In high school, a man at the grocery store asked if I was Serbian. As an adult, between the Lake Superior basin and the Southwest, the guesses run Latina or Mediterranean or somewhere in the Altai Mountains region.
This is not incidental. It is the reason the cross-cultural synthesis in the jewelry is not a design choice. It is just who I am. I have always existed at the intersection of multiple traditions. The jewelry is the long-term result of that.
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. It starts with a sketch, comically bad chicken scratch that is nonetheless structurally intentional. I'm thinking about load and balance before I touch a single bead.
Sometimes the hypothesis holds. The palette works, the structure lays true, the piece does what I expected. Sometimes physics says "nope, tough kumquats" and it's back to the drawing board. Do I add a truss? Struts? Reconsider the load path entirely? The process is iterative either way.
Every stone is chosen the way I'd choose a field specimen. I want to know the mineralogy. I want to know where it formed and why it looks the way it does. The stone is never filler. It is the starting point.
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. I'm not going to pretend textiles don't have an environmental cost.
What You End Up With
Pieces designed to look like they came from somewhere.
Not bought. Collected.
The collection is here.
New pieces drop without warning. If you want to know when, and hear the design backstory before anyone else, join the email list.