Discover the inspiration behind handmade jewellery, from gemstones and landscapes to art, memories and words, and how ideas evolve into unique designs.

I am often get asked where my inspiration for my beaded necklace designs come from, and I would laugh and say, “just about anywhere”.  But I did not always design as intentionally as I do now. In the earlier years, much of my approach was more exploratory and ad hoc. I thought a great deal about colour pairings, and I drew inspiration from contemporary bead artists such as Rita Okrent, necklaces featured in various books on beads, and from handmade jewellery I encountered in shops. I was absorbing ways of combining beads, colour and form long before I consciously thought about my own design process.

The early years of necklace making saw me doing repeated sequences designs, such as A-B-A-B.  Over time, however, the process became more deliberate, especially around the time I began consigning necklaces to a few boutiques in the late ‘90s. Inspiration also began to come not just from beads themselves, but also places, landscapes, art, architecture, memories, images and yes, words.

 

The beads, whether gemstone, vintage or metal, in  their infinite richness of colours, patterns textures, and craftsmanship, inspire. Besides gemstone beads, I also collected silver beads from Bali, Thailand, Nepal and China, and  Intricate (available on our website), paired with amazonite and lapis, was designed to show off the skill and artistry embodied in some of these silver beads. Similarly, in The Silversmith (not currently in our shop; please contact us if you would like more information) where I specifically showcase the silver beads from Bali.

Voilà (available) grew out of a collection of natural, untreated agate beads within a similar tonal palette, For One Year On (available), which I designed to mark Manik’s first anniversary, I deliberately chose the watery blue and purple chalcedony for their calm, soothing tones.

So sometimes the materials themselves speak strongly enough to provide the inspiration.

At other times, the handmade jewellery Australia buyers encounter online on Manik’s website may also have been inspired by a place, a landscape or a memory.

I was travelling in South America in late ’23 and was particularly captivated by my day spent in the Atacama Desert. I first tried to recall my sense of it in a beaded necklace with tabular agate, rutilated quartz and aquamarine discs.  But I found myself designing a second necklace as well, this time to specifically captured the sense of space that I wanted to express, using ocean jasper, agate, rock crystal and gold accents. I called the first one Hues of Atacama, the second just Atacama.

Graceful Nepalese silver-wrapped bicones with inlays of turquoise called to mind stained-glass mosaic windows, and steeples, inspiring Steeples and Domes. I paired them with round, grooved  silver rounds for a dome-like effect, red tiger’s eye and turquoise to create a wearable skyline, recalling the churches and cathedrals I had visited in Europe.

Then there was Topography (available). I was playing around with the agate barrels, placing them next to zebra jasper nuggets, when they suddenly reminded of the contour maps that I had to draw in secondary-school geography lessons. Geography was not one of my favourite subjects, although I did manage to do the contour maps reasonably well. I thought it would be fun to design a necklace around that memory, using the agate and zebra jasper together with moonstone and grey pearls.

 

Other sources of inspiration for my handmade jewellery can be quite diverse – art, art language, images, science fiction, to yes, words themselves. I am no art connoisseur, but I do enjoy art, especially visiting art museums and galleries when I travel.

The inspiration from art is less direct than say, from gemstone beads themselves. But when I acquired the flat oval and drop-shaped beads of the turquoise-toned amazonite (a new variety), I was immediately reminded of the blues of swimming pools, particularly those in various David Hockney’s paintings. The flat stone shapes also felt like water seen from above. I therefore chose not to dilute the intensity of the blue with other gemstone beads but introduced bright sterling silver beads which glint between the stones, like flashes of light dancing across a pool’s surface. Splash! (available) is thus a beaded necklace inspired by David Hockney’s art.

Chiaroscurro, the first necklace I designed for Manik, began with an art-historical term rather than an image. I wanted to translate the idea of dramatic light–dark contrast into beads, pairing black goldstone glass with gold striping against luminous golden healer.

I read a lot of science fiction in earlier years, and that has been another source of influence. UFOs (available) is a retro-futurist  long necklace of beautifully handmade vintage glass beads in black, white, gold and red. To me, it evokes an imaginative fleet of sophisticated spaceships lined up, and ready to take off, on a mission of amity and goodwill to other worlds. Similarly, Interstellar, one of my earlier conceptual necklaces, brought together black-and-white banded agate, pale tabular stones, rock crystal and silver in a long composition that, to me, suggested unknown celestial bodies, light, distance and movement through space.

Images encountered in magazines can also leave an imprint and resurface much later as inspiration. Gilded Grove (available) shows how handmade jewellery can draw  inspiration from interiors as well as from jewellery itself. Its inspiration came from richly decorated interiors, particularly the interplay of saturated colour, gilded details and ornamental pattern. I wanted to translate that sense of layered richness into beads without making the piece feel overly ornate.  The beaded necklace is distinctive and warmly expressive without being overpowering.

Finally, I have an affinity for language, and words themselves can provide inspiration. I saw a design challenge in the word ‘greyscale’, and set out to prove otherwise, with an asymmetric necklace in different shapes of black obsidian, Korean white jade, natural agate and onyx. The necklace Greyscale is lively and distinctive, certainly not dull!

 

BUT - and this is a big but - while inspiration may provide the starting point, it often does not dictate the finished necklace. Somewhere between the first idea and the final arrangement comes the less predictable business of experimenting, discarding, adjusting and sometimes being surprised by where the design chooses to go. A beaded necklace Australia customers see on Manik’s website may therefore have travelled quite a distance from the idea that first prompted it.

After the first spark of an idea comes the work of thinking about what it means to 'translate' the idea into a design, what beads would be needed, colours, shapes, textures. Sometimes,  I need to do further 'research' on the source of inspiration itself.

Then comes the searching among the beads, and the iterations, tentative at first, then with more assurance, hopefully. Finally, there may be a frisson of excitement: this is it! But there can equally be the disappointing realisation that the idea simply isn’t going to work.  If I remain uncertain, I may set aside the design and return to it later or seek the opinion of someone I trust. There are also times when the design process takes on a life of its own and I end up designing something completely different from what I had originally envisaged!

So, there it is. A rather messy business with uncertain outcomes, but exciting!

Earthbound (available),featuring gemstone beads of tiger's eye and jasper  is a necklace that was originally inspired by geometric shapes and was called Colour Blocks. When I reviewed it later, I found it rather brash and deconstructed it, starting over. I kept the beautifully patterned brecciated jasper but decided to substitute the big octagonal shield-like tiger’s eye tablets with smaller frosted brown tiger’s eye tablets with rounded edges that gave the necklace a softer feel. And thus the necklace evolved. Earthbound is now a richly warm necklace with russet and brown tones, evocative of autumn, and, for me, of my first autumn walk in the woods in Bristol many years ago.

Similarly, Gilded Grove was originally a necklace called Pebbles and Blooms, with the yellow cloisonné beads paired with yellow agate pebbles. It was pleasant, but not particularly memorable, and I felt that more could be done with the distinctive cloisonné beads. That was when images of richly decorated interiors came to mind, taking the re-design in a different direction.

Steeples and Domes, however, stayed quite close to its original inspiration  in the churches and cathedrals in Europe. As did  Cornucopia (available) which brings together soft celadon serpentine cones and warm red and golden yellow agate in a balanced, rhythmic composition Its starting point was the symbolism of abundance and nourishment embodied in the cornucopia of Greek mythology.

In the end, inspiration is only the beginning. For me, the character of handmade jewellery only emerges through translation — in the choices, revisions and occasional surprises that turn an initial idea into a necklace that feels like a resounding yes.

Some of the necklaces mentioned in this article (Hues of Atacama, Atacama, Steeples and Domes, Chiaroscurro, Greyscale and Interstellar) are currently not on our website. Please contact us if you would like more information about any of them.