Creating is such a personal process. For me, I must be in a certain mood to create. Sometimes I let this feeling grow inside of me for some time before I choose to express it. If I wait to long, it feels painful and such a delicious relief when I finally do get to create.

When it is time to create, I enjoy working in stages. I'll get a craving for a certain type of jewelry, sometimes based on that item being low in stock, but also sometimes I just feel an urge to do something new or something that feels super satisfying. My recent urge was to make malas. It started from getting a custom order for 3 malas. That was just enough to get my mala love kindled.

I love to design a large batches of pieces at one time. For malas, I will pull out some of my boxes of beads and find those special pieces or special combo of pieces that will be the focus beads. Here's a photo of most of my boxes of beads. Lots of special gemstones, some boxes just of metal beads, some wood and coconut boxes, organized by color or by type of beads. This is definitely one of my happy places... haha

After a few hours of pulling out the stones that are speaking to me at that time, I will have a lovely collection of possible beads to use. Part of my job is to listen to the stones to know who wants to live with who. Sometimes I will use my mind to think - oh those 2 stones would be nice together - but when I put them next to each other, sometimes they just seem to repel from each other. Then I know their energies aren't matching and they are not supposed to live together in one mala.

Here you can see my black tray with some gemstone combos being considered, along with my box of mala staples of coconut, ebony and other types of wood. There's also a strand of special yak bone beads I found which were asking me to please use them and allow them to have a new home. Sometimes, I hold onto special beads for a little while, or even a long while. I've had these yak bone for over 10 years now and haven't been ready to part with them before. But they managed to convince me this time...

After a bit more planning and negotiating with the stones, I came up with a rough pile of beads that seem to want to be made into a mala. Sometimes when it comes down to the actual creation, things shift around. Like you can see a wing charm that seemed like a fun idea but it just didn't flow right when I started making the piece.

So many ideas go through my head! Only a select few actually become manifest.

I decided to start with a coconut mala this time. I really love working with coconut. It's so warm and solid, a different energy than wood. It's a bit heavier and so beautiful to hold. Here I am using brown and tiger coconut beads with blue kyanite and a few whitewood beads for accent. Once I put all the beads in the tray, I like to lay out the design with the proper number of beads - 108. I never used to use a bead board. I used to go much more by feeling and memory, but I found that some patterns required a lot of counting, so this organizer really makes things much easier.

And here's the final result. You can see that I changed the guru bead. Unfortunately, some beads, especially the softer ones like kyanite, don't have big enough holes for me to get all 4 strands of thread plus the needle through them. But the copper cone worked out well and is fun with the coconut beads.

I think I manage to make about 18 malas or so out of this burst of creativity. It took me about 10 days, on and off to make them all. Some days, I'd make 3 or 4. Some days, just one. I watched a lot of movies while creating.