Signs and beading - a new collection in the making

Signs are an important way of communicating in many ancient and contemporary cultures and the process of making meaning from the signs of cultures other than our own can be puzzling, fascinating and inspiring all at once.

In my new pattern collection I am celebrating our human capacity to communicate through signs in and across cultures. My first pattern is based on the musical notation of a G Clef and it celebrates our capacity to communicate music to each other through one particular sign system that originated many hundreds of years ago in Europe (around the 10th Century) and is now commonly used in western musical forms to indicate the pitch of the written notes that follow it. As with all signs it will mean different things to different people - for non-musicians it's meaning will be much less specific than for musicians. I wonder what it means to you. For me as a designer and a beader the wonderful curl of the clef was fascinating to try to emulate, it was a beading challenge - The C and F Clefs are equally fun and challenging to do and the designs are on the way.... stay tuned!