A Millenium bead, with eyes open to see the future

Working mainly with Spectrum stained glass scrap and Effetre (Moretti) glass rods, Drew-Wilkinson makes her beads in a variety of shapes and patterns - mostly uncomplicated shapes, but incredibly complicated patterns. Many seem to be spherical microcosms of undersea life; some are an impressionist's notion of the new Millennium (featuring an eye wide open so as not to miss anything); and others are as richly decorative and bright as miniature Christmas tree ornaments. Still others could be planets spinning through space as seen through a telescope.

The series she calls her Tidepool beads are an assortment of colorful sea life created and preserved in glass. One, for example, features a lavender conch and a purple-and-white sea urchin among other shells, tentacled together by layers of lacy seaweed in pale green, orange, and sand color, and encompassed in swirls of green, slate blue, white seawater, and yellow sea foam. Drew-Wilkinson fashions all her beads into jewelry - necklaces, earrings, or pendants with silver findings, delicately twisted wires dotted above and below the glass bead with tiny silver accent beads. She also sometimes adds, at the bail, a glass bead in a color complementary to the focus bead.

Her Millennium beads are equally dramatic. Against a matrix of what, by design, looks more like bone than glass, she sets luminescent shapes and the somewhat shocking eyeball, set into a larger round of burgundy, mottled gold, and peacock-blue swirls. The eye, she says, is “to indicate that we need to be awake when the change comes, the better to deal with it.”

Among Drew-Wilkinson's loveliest beads, if among the simplest in design, are her Earth beads, spheres a scant inch in diameter, made up of swirls of color, each terminating in a textured curlicue. These beads, made from Spectrum glass, are made by first fusing powder blue, transparent blue, clear, and white glass, then attaching the gather to a punty and adding swirls of fawn-tan and green. The texture, tiny dots, and the curlicues are achieved by heating specific areas, then drawing with a clear stringer.

A bead inspired by images from the Hubble space telescope

“The Earth beads are interesting but demanding,” she says of the beads that until recently she made primarily for The Nature Company, a firm with dozens of outlets across the country. Drew-Wilkinson supplied them all. “For years I was filling orders and making a lot of money, but I wasn't free,” she says of the work that she felt had become “too assembly line,” too constricted. “In 1995, I started doing my own thing, and only then began to be a real bead maker. Now, I'm really learning about glass, how it moves, how clear and opaque work together. I experiment, develop texture, and study views from the Hubble telescope searching for new ideas for beads.”

A tree bead by Kate-Drew Wilkinson

Drew-Wilkinson takes a closer look at the Earth in another recent bead, a rich-looking, two-inch oval that features a glass abstract of a tree. Its gnarled trunk is brown, green, and luminous white, and ridged brown branches arc through a canopy of foliage-silhouetted horizontal bands of light blue, white, and lime green.

Beads this complex have not always been Drew-Wilkinson's style. She started as many bead makers do, by working purchased beads into jewelry. Twenty-five years ago, she and her young son, Noah, lived for a year in a beach house in Costa Rica, where she earned a living wire wrapping stones into earrings. But in the 11 years since she first lampworked beads, her work has gone through a distinct evolution. Her early efforts were prosaic if attractive, but today, even she doesn't hesitate to exclaim at the beauty of the beads she makes.

USING HER HANDS. Drew-Wilkinson says she first learned to use her hands at about age eight from a German governess who taught her to sew, draw, play guitar and flute, and sculpt with clay. The two spent memorable hours “taking nature walks, watching plants grow, and wading into ponds,” she adds with a smile. She's eager to tell the story of her life, talking in a crisp accent undiminished by the fact that she left her native England more than three decades ago.

Listening to her, you wonder how anyone could have squeezed so much into only six decades. If her story was presented as an imaginative work of fiction, the novelist would probably be criticized for inventing an unrealistic number of adventures for her heroine. One can listen for hours while she recalls such things as the air raids during the Blitz that sent her and her schoolmates scurrying for shelter wearing Mickey Mouse gas masks. She talks about her years as an aspiring actress, making papier-maché trees and other props for London's Old Vic Theatre, where she hoped to one day perform, and she remembers films she appeared in, including her role as a handmaiden in Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

One of Kate Drew-Wilkinson's amphora beads

Born in Oxford, she traveled with her mother, Louise, an American-born journalist, to Germany where her stepfather, Tony Drew-Wilkinson, an army major in the Royal Scots, was stationed. As a toddler, “like all good upper-class English girls,” she was sent to Willows, a “baby boarding school” in Berkshire, England, where she lived until she was six, then moved on to a boarding school in Devonshire to live among 40 girls, mostly daughters of diplomats.

“The emphasis at school was on riding horses, learning country dances, reciting poetry, learning to cook and garden, knowing trees and wildflowers,” she said. “It was a beautiful school.” But after four years her mother “decided she was becoming too much of a snob,” and she was sent to an Anglican convent outside Newbury, where she stayed until she was 18.

“It was the traditional English thing to do, but parents and children never really got to know one another, and vacations were uncomfortable,” she recalls. “I directed my love toward creative endeavors - as an artist, and as a performer.”

Drew-Wilkinson says her mother insisted she go to secretarial college, although she had her heart set on becoming an actress. “I pleaded to go to drama school, and Mother said okay, but it had to be the hardest one, Bristol Old Vic,” she says. Drew-Wilkinson not only went, but won a scholarship, studying singing, dancing, and fencing.

Drew-Wilkinson designs jewelry, such as this earring set, building on her experience as a self-taught wire-wrapper.

After graduation, Drew-Wilkinson went to London hoping for roles, but earned her living mostly in the traditional struggling-actress roles of waitress and nanny, as well as more distinctive pursuits, including making stuffed animals and creating decorations for debutante balls for designer Adam Pollock, “who had a huge budget.” Acting jobs came, but they were mainly either commercials or stunt work riding horses and motorbikes. She traveled, living briefly in Malta, Tunisia, Greece, and Turkey. Earning her passage as a cook, she sailed on a catamaran through the Messina Straits and up the Italian coast, and then, when a storm kept the boat docked in Naples for a few days, in true romantic heroine fashion, met and fell in love with a handsome Italian. But things didn't work out, and “nursing a broken heart,” she returned to London.

“Five years later I was engaged, and finally had just gotten to know my real father, a journalist who lived near me,” she said. “But within the year both he and my fiancé died. It was a very traumatic time.”

The owner of a boutique in Los Angeles who was visiting London offered her a much-needed change of scenery, which Drew-Wilkinson accepted. She came to the United States, taking the position as manager of the shop, Belinda's on Sunset Strip. “But I still wanted to act and sing, and to keep my chops up I took acting classes,” she said. Among her classmates were David and Keith Carradine and Sharon Tate. During the next few years she sang back-up with performer Johnny Rivers at Whisky a Go Go, a club “where Elvis attended rehearsals,” and landed a role in the bawdy review Oh, Calcutta!

Drew-Wilkinson made her Face beads as a means of self-expression for children with learning disabilities. One side of each bead shows a happy face, the other shows a sad face, and the child can show whichever face they want to convey their emotions.

“The show was so notorious I was recognized everywhere, and I got a taste of what it was like to be famous - it's the end of your private life.” It wasn't the life she wanted. “I'm a thinker,” she says. “I can't tolerate that intrusion.”

It was on the Greek island of Rhodes that she met the man who in 1973 became the father of her son, Noah. The couple didn't marry, but remain close to this day. “I had begun working with beads, making hair ties,” she said. “It was a happy time - beads had gotten big.” When Noah was a year old, Drew-Wilkinson flew with him to Costa Rica with “a package of beads, my jewelry-making tools, and only $500 to my name,” she recalls with a smile. “I was out on a limb, but I had everything I needed,” she says. “I've always been able to earn a living wherever I am.”

She worked a deal for food with a neighbor. The woman wanted her daughter to learn French, and Drew-Wilkinson bartered a lesson every day in exchange for a hot meal for her and her son. While there, she also taught herself to wire wrap, making earrings to sell to tourists. A year later, mother and son returned to California. “I lived hand to mouth, making pen-and-ink drawings and oil paintings to sell in local shops and restaurants,” she says. “But I was also making jewelry, and had gotten pretty damn good at it!”

Her luck changed when she met Andrew Romanov, owner of a jewelry factory in Point Reyes, where they manufactured her silver and Swarovski crystal jewelry. She began making chokers, bar pins, and bracelets as well as earrings, and her work started appearing in catalogs. It was at that time that a representative of The Nature Company in Berkeley saw her jewelry.

“I thought my line was good for the company,” she says. “Sylva Raker, the jewelry buyer, agreed, and I got a $7,000 order.” Drew-Wilkinson hired three women, opened a studio in Sausalito, and they made earrings, 40 pairs an hour, wire wrapping a rainbow of stones - lapis lazuli, amethyst, rose quartz, aventurine, onyx, and snow- flake obsidian. It was the beginning of a happy and profitable business relationship; she made jewelry for The Nature Company for about eight years. She was also making jewelry for galleries, using silver and stones. “At the time, as far as I know, nobody except me was splicing stones into chains,” she says.

DISCOVERING BEADS. Drew-Wilkinson began attending bead conferences in the late 1980s and became well versed in bead history, though at the time few in this country were actually making beads.

“In 1989, at the 2nd International Bead Conference in Washington, D.C., I saw lampworked beads by Patti Frantz and Brian Kerkvliet, and I knew I had to find a teacher to show me how to make them,” she says. “I found Linda Honeycutt LeGrand from Columbus, Ohio.”

Drew-Wilkinson flew to Ohio and stayed a week for an introduction to the art of lampwork. “She taught me the elementary things - how to melt glass on the mandrel, how to operate the propane and oxygen tanks. And she taught me safety. Linda was one of the great people who brought others in. She taught responsible bead making.”

By the time Drew-Wilkinson married British writer Colin Haynes, she had become well known in circles of bead enthusiasts and had begun lecturing on bead history. “When Colin's visa expired and he had to leave the country, we drove into Mexico towing a trailer loaded with 12 crates of beads, $40,000 worth, some of them dating back 4,000 years, and silver findings,” she says. “I was determined to keep The Nature Company supplied.” They found an acre with beautiful stone walls and guava trees at the end of a three-mile cobbled road near Guadalajara, and set up shop.

For her Water beads, Drew-Wilkinson first made beads of clear glass, which she rolled in frit of opaque and clear blues and greens, then swirled the colors with the tip of a steel dental tool.

“I located a source nearby for stained glass scrap, and suggested to The Nature Company that I make beads from recycled glass,” she says. “I sent samples, and they ordered 450 necklaces of 26 beads each.” The result was her Water Bead collection. To make the beads she would need frit, but Drew-Wilkinson, typically innovative, came up with a way of making it. “I bought an industrial-size meat grinder to crush the glass, then used an industrial-strength magnet to lift the metal bits out of the glass,” she said. “The first step in making the beads was mixing a potion of colors - Prussian blue, white, clear green, opaque blue, and opaque green - for the frit.”

Working over the torch, she made beads of clear glass, which she rolled in the frit, then swirled the colors into abstract shapes with the pointed tip of a steel dental tool. The beads, combined with small round silver beads and silver dolphin clasps, became necklaces, strung on hand-knotted nylon. Drew-Wilkinson hired several local women to help with the hand knotting, and in three months was able to turn out 12,000 beads.

“I was growing as an artist, and began teaching wire work and bead making at a school in Guadalajara,” she says. “At the time nobody in Mexico knew how to put a hole in a bead.” Drew-Wilkinson believes she was the one who “brought contemporary lampwork bead making into Mexico” a decade ago. After a year, the couple returned to California.

In 1993, Drew-Wilkinson moved to Bisbee, Arizona, where she set up a studio in a “barn with a tile floor that's big enough to park four cars side by side in it.” The studio includes four propane/oxygen torches, two of which she uses for teaching, and an electric kiln made from a mailbox by Dudley Giberson, the first person to make kilns of that sort. She uses the kiln to anneal her lampworked beads, and for a crackle effect on flat glass, which she achieves by heating the glass to 500 degrees Farenheit, then dunking it in cold water. In the place of the long-gone meat grinder, her studio now includes a coffee grinder for making frit. After she started to do her own thing in 1995, Drew-Wilkinson developed an interest in dichroic glass, which now often appears deep inside her beads, and also began adding gold and silver leaf and foil, goldstone, and silver shavings to her beads. Silver wire also continues to play an important role in her work.

At the Glass Artists Society conference in Tucson four years ago, she met Richard and Barbara Beadman, who run the Plowden and Thompson Glass Factory in Stourbridge near Birmingham, England. She has since tested glass at the factory, been a houseguest of the owners, and become fond of the glass they make, which, like Moretti, contains no lead.

“The factory is a Dickensian place where colored rods and much more are created by third and fourth generation glass workers,” she says. “But they didn't know how to put a hole in a bead!” Drew-Wilkinson offered to teach a course in bead making, and since then her students have taught others. The glass bead society in Stourbridge now counts 40 members, with Drew-Wilkinson an honorary member. “The Beadmans' passion for making glass rods is offering opportunities to English artists,” she says.

And as for Drew-Wilkinson? “I'm fully committed to spending my days being an artist, irrespective of the economy.”

She sells her work online, on the www.ebay.com auction site, but takes no orders, and no longer supplies galleries or shops. She does participate in bead shows, Recursos in Santa Fe and the Best Bead Show in Tucson among them. She has also written and illustrated two books, The Complete Guide to Basic Wire Work for Bead Jewelry and How to be Successful in the Bead Jewelry Business, and produced an accompanying video. She has recently released a new video, Making Beads with Stained Glass Remnants, the first in a planned series.

Kate Drew-Wilkinson at work in her studio.

Her impetus to share her expertise is hands-on as well; she is known in bead circles for taking on apprentices and “giving them freedom to grow under my wing.” She also spends three weeks every fall at Young's Farm near Dewey, Arizona, where a pumpkin festival is held. “I work with children there, talk to them about creativity, make beads for them,” she says. “It's a wonderful time.” Drew-Wilkinson is also known for now and again leaving a bead for a stranger to find, a gift in an unexpected place, such as on a trail in the desert or on a hilltop. “I have been leaving things around for the 'unknown stranger' on my travels since I was a child,” she says. “When I was a little girl, I would leave pennies on a rock, thinking about the person who would find something yummy.”

Drew-Wilkinson acknowledges her many attempts at creative endeavors, but in lampworking glass she has found her true calling. As she puts it, she “can't not” make beads, and enjoys the thought that “if a bead is well annealed, it will last a thousand years - I like knowing my work will be here so far in the future.”

And after all the experimenting, she's finally settled down into what she loves best. “I don't know anybody happier than I am,” she adds with a wide grin. “I love my life, I love my home, and I love my work to distraction.”