Craft camp ceremonial bead making Spring 2023
(A message to the reader.)
It is the second year of lockdowns and I am in my kitchen. On the stove is a cast-iron frypan, the kind that are sold for camping, filled to the brim with camellia petals. The flowers are from my mum’s camellia bush, a small shrub on the south side of her shed-cum-studio where she once took music lessons and now operates a counselling practice.
Lockdown is freeing. The kids are at home, and we don’t see anyone except my mum and stepdad, who live next door. And because I don’t have school runs to do, I have more time for research. And because I already have an interest in bead making—in some way, I am already a bead maker—even though I haven’t chosen this path of my own will, but by some other force pushing me to it, I am googling beads. Rosaries to be precise.
One of my most loved plants to work with is the vulnerability tree. In the parts of the world where it grows, they call it the rosary tree because it is used to make rosaries, but because I met her after a counselling session in which my husband and I talked about vulnerability, she will always be the vulnerability tree to me. Her Latin name is Melia Azedarach, and her seeds are the perfect bead. Five ribs running top to bottom, pale brown, sometimes with a gradient, a tiny aperture through the centre that can be made infinitesimally wider with a needle, or burnt through with a red hot skewer. I made my first batch into a rosary for my husband, which he wears along with my first batch of camellia beads, threaded with a Blackwood slab and named “monk’s beads”.
What is the rosary? I have owned one since I was 13 and was baptised into the Catholic Church in Trentham by a Maltese priest with sleep apnoea and a relish for theatre. The matriarch of Trentham Catholics, Mary Walsh, gifted me a tiny blue-beaded rosary with silver fittings and a silver crucifix. I don’t use crucifixes in my rosaries. I have seen too much of death.
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- Beads drying on trays
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- Peirced beads on tray
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- Flowers cooking
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- Camellia petals cooking for beads, blue
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- Jane’s rosaries
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- Jane’s rosaries with sheoak pods
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- Bead drying on trays with red teapot
Each bead is a prayer, each prayer a flower, each flower a bead. In my kitchen, I am cooking camellia petals, carefully stripped of their stamens and pistils, and all the little flower spiders carefully helped outside. They turn from pink to purple. After I have put them through the food processor and cooked them down to a dough-like paste, they turn almost black. I sit at the table in the dining room, darkness all around and the electric light above. With my fingers, I pinch off small knobs of flower petal dough and roll them into balls between my two palms so that they hold all the secrets of my palm lines, reading them and reorienting them towards devotion.
Is this what prayer is? Is this careful shaping of things not yet made hard? Before the dough dries out, wrinkling as it loses size and moisture, I take a skewer and holding each newly fashioned bead between thumb and forefinger, I pierce it through. It reminds me of nails being driven into flesh, of thorns biting foreheads, of the fierce beauty of compassion.
…with each prayer, a flower blossomed from his mouth until a garland was made before him.
There’s an old European story of a boy who each day made a flower garland for the Lady, meaning Mary, of course, or the old Mother Goddess who is known the world over by many different names. Later, he entered a monastery, and when it was forbidden, or at the very least discouraged, to make his garlands. But the Lady came to him, saying, ‘Speak your prayers’. And with each prayer, a flower blossomed from his mouth until a garland was made before him.
Is this the origin of the rosary? Nobody knows. There is another story about a man named St Dominic. There are stories of rose gardens. There are older stories of knots tied into string. And there are even older stories written in teeth and bone of beads in the fossil record. For as long as humans have shaped things, they have made beads, objects pierced through and threaded, like our hearts on threads of longing for this life. For as long as we have been making things, there have been beads, and there has been the earth, each shaped in the others’ likeness.
I like the story of the boy the best because it is simple and because the rosary, at heart, is simple. It is a form of reverence for the mother that feeds us and daily gives us life. In their book, The Way of the Rose, Clark Strand and Perdita Finn write about beads as nipples: something to hold onto when times get tough. Mothers never abandon their children, even if, for some reason, they forsake them in this life. Is this why we make beads? Is this why we use them to anchor our prayers?
There is such beauty in making beads out of flowers. Some people add clay, but the flowers themselves have such ephemeral beauty and harden into a substance similar to stone. The practice of making them this way, out of petals alone, is a hidden art passed from mother to daughter, accomplished in kitchens, where food is made, and bodies are nourished. Anyone with access to flowers and thread can make a rosary. It costs next to nothing, and when the beads wear out or break from holding the prayers of its maker, another can be fashioned to carry new ones to the ears of the Lady, by whatever name you know her.
About Shalome Lateef
Shalome is an Australian-born woman of European and UK heritage. Her bead-making practice is based in Ballarat, on Wadawurrung Lands, and she co-facilitates a bi-annual craft camp “Stitching the Sacred” in Hopetoun, Victoria. She has recently completed her training as a Forest Therapy Guide with the ANFT and is excited about witnessing people fall back in love with the earth.
