The dream of Sibylla

But before I’d show you what’s inside our newest Theme Box and what we are going to play with during the upcoming 2 weeks, let me share with you a little conversation that we had with fellow Beadingschool Academy beaders during the previous week at the Great British Bead Show. Because it wasn’t all about Scottish peninsulas, celebration dances after a successful workshop and the possibility of turning Percy Pig into vodka. Sometimes there was also time for beads, of course 😀 So, in one of the classes we were talking about the Academy and trying to explain what it is to beaders who didn’t know it yet. As most of you know, it brings lots of inspiration and value to a beader’s life – and exactly that’s why it’s sometimes hard to catch the essence of it in one sentence.

At least that was my impression until Anzelika said: “the Academy brings structure into your obsession.”

That was a serious lightbulb moment for many of us, and when I saw all the photos that you posted recently about the jewellery you made during the previous two months, I knew that it’s the biggest value of it indeed. Not only the wide array of jewels that you made is astonishing, but also how you are starting to walk your own journeys, personalising your jewels, experimenting more and more. Your ‘library’ of beading skills is growing, and I see you daily getting braver and braver to use those tricks and tips that you’ve learned.

The Beadingschool Academy brings you a new source of inspiration every second month, with a curated Theme Box full of beads and components, tutorials, and weekly #NoOneHasToBeadAlone workshops that are also designed with the Academy Theme on our minds. Today, it’s time to see what the next two months are going to be about.

The next Theme is called ‘The Dream of Sibylla.’ We are going to follow the footsteps of Maria Sibylla Merian – a scientist and artist with a dream. She was born in the 17. century in Germany, later settled in The Netherlands. Her enthusiasm about getting to know the nature and share the knowledge lead her all the way to Suriname. At the age of 52, after a divorce, she traveled together with her younger daughter to South America with a plan to spend there 5 years, documenting insects, among them many butterflies and dragonflies, and plants of the country.

The result is a book full of her illustrations and observations. For our next Theme Box I selected shapes that I think will come useful when we would like to create our own butterflies and dragonflies, but with the colour scheme I followed my imagination and a set of purple, pink, and gold that came to me when I was thinking about following our dreams.

And a small about Sibylla: she was not employed by a corporation, and she was highly critical of the merchants, the slave trade, and using Suriname’s nature and people like they were. She was mocked by authorities because of this, and was between the few scientists who recorded local names of plants and insects.