Gail H. Devoid by Sigrid Wynne-Evans   Gail Devoid is a well known presence in the on-line bead groups. She offers beaders unending advice, help and encouragement. Beaders have truly become to admire her unequalled generosity and help.   Gail is also proud that she is now the Corresponding Secretary for the Bead Society of New Hampshire (BSNH). She hopes to help enhance the organization with ideas that she share with the rest of the board of directors.   Gail creates wonderful beadwork that she shares in the photo files in Fun_with_Bead-Patterns@yahoogroups.com. She is quite prolific! Don't miss seeing her work.   Gail's offerings on Bead-Patterns.com include classy amulet bag patterns and bead crochet. Be sure to take a look at her patterns!

Here is Gail's story:

I was born and raised in Bristol, Connecticut, a city small enough in the early 1950s to have the feel of a town. Through my years of going through the city's grammar and high school, the city grew tremendously. I left Bristol to start my college education at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. By that time, my mother had taught me how to knit, crochet, sew, and embroidered, but most of my handicraft at the time was knitting.

My exposure to beading was early, just before my teen years. This consisted of a small Indian loom that came with opaque beads and a Southwestern pattern. My child hands struggled to warp the loom. Although I had little trouble following the pattern, invariably I would miss a bead or two when I sewed back through the beads. Unfortunately, the directions did not give easy ways to correct the mistakes. I junked the resulting bracelet quickly, as not only did it look horrible, but also the design hardly appealed to an 11-year old girl growing up in the New England area. Worse, finding more beads was impossible: no bead stores existed in Bristol and the Internet was not an option.

I continued to live in Bristol after getting married until my husband and I built a house in Harwinton, Connecticut. A twenty-minute drive from Bristol, I was still close to family and friends, but I was now living in a rural area. Gardening became my passion, and before I moved to New Hampshire in 1993, I completed the Master Gardener program through the Connecticut Co-operative Extension, taking the course of study at the University of Connecticut branch in West Hartford.

New Hampshire soil gave me a challenge, but gardens bloomed at my new home in Boscawen. My main craft changed from knitting to sewing, until my studies consumed all my free time. Having finished an undergraduate degree in management, I went on to earn a masters degree in organization and management, learning online. Another area of study through the 1980s had prepared me for this learning environment, as I had been very active at CompuServe in their gardening forum. For years, I supplied the sysop in California with seeds from my gardens, seeds that sprouted all over the United States and brought beauty to many.

Sampling of Gail's Designs:
Click on an image to view the pattern information.
      

Before I started working on a Ph.D. in IT management, I took one summer off, and gardened contentedly. My only exposure to beading came when my husband Ricky ordered a catalog from Fire Mountain Gems and urged me to look through it. I did so in a perfunctorily manner, but put it aside when I could not figure out the purpose of all these findings. The catalogs came for years; they piled up.

Meanwhile, through years of study and hard work, I became a Ph.D. candidate. The stress of planning the dissertation became incredible. How would I choose my dissertation topic from the myriad options? How was I going to design the research? Beading actually helped me with that.

The beading part of my life started with a gift from my husband of a pin that was a reproduction in glass of the Hope diamond. I mentioned to him that the owners of the Hope diamond had worn the piece as a necklace. Turning to a familiar tool, I searched the Internet for a brooch converter, finding one at B'sue Boutiques. With this order came a small bag of beads, and a silver finding, one suitable for a cabochon stone. Being happy with the new way to wear the faux Hope Diamond pin, I wondered what I could do with this free finding.

A search of the Internet and e-Bay and I found and bought an onyx cabochon that would fit the finding. However, I was not sure which glue or epoxy I should use to put the components together.

Most of my career, I have worked as a Controller or Chief Financial Officer, managing accounting departments. At work, a woman in sales had a hobby of making jewelry, and I turned to her for advice. She helped me with this first jewelry-making project and mentioned she was selling her seed beads, findings, books, cording, and thread and getting out of the hobby. Before she broke up the collection of beading supplies at a yard sale, I asked to see everything. We struck a deal and I bought everything.

I spent weeks learning what everything was, again employing the Internet. The Fire Mountain Gems catalogs became a reference book. The Mirrix loom appealed to me. Research on how it worked brought me to the two groups that I credit with helping me bloom quickly with this art and craft: The Bead Society of New Hampshire (BSNH) and the Fun With Bead-Patterns.com Yahoo Group.

At the first BSNH meeting, I saw exquisite seed bead jewelry, polymer clay beads done by artist Ann Dillon, lampworking beads by several NH artists, and woman learning bead crochet. The program that day was how to do an invisible join of a bead crochet tube. I was enthralled. Discussion of an upcoming bead retreat, where Edie Leone, the woman who taught Judith Bertoglio-Giffin and Cathy Lee Lielausis how to bead crochet, would hold a bead crochet class convinced me to join the society immediately. I planned my retreat around the wonderful classes BSNH offered, one of which was a peyote stitch class.

Sampling of Gail's Designs:
Click on an image to view the pattern information.
   

Edie Leone is one of the beaders who influenced me the most. I share her love of bead crochet and peyote. The bead classes I have taken have been through the BSNH. The only art class I took was part of my formal education, but still having the college books, I reviewed color theory. One piece of which I am most proud employs the peyote stitch and my knowledge of Egyptian history: the Bastet Amulet bag.

Bastet Amulet:
 
   

This bag represents my first successful peyote project and the start of my designing. Using a free pattern available in Bead & Button Magazine, I searched the Internet for an ankh. Finding a picture of one from the 16th dynasty, I used The Bead Cellar software program to create my first word map and graph. My desire to have a custom-made bag that used Bastet and the ankh prompted me to take the step from following the patterns of others to doing my own.

Sampling of Gail's Designs:
Click on an image to view the pattern information.
      

The BSNH has a Yahoo Group, and my questions were many. One fellow member suggested I look free patterns at bead-patterns.com to learn other beading stitches. My research efforts turned to this website, and within a few minutes, I joined the Yahoo group associated with the site.

Here I found people with a tremendous amount of knowledge and quite willing to share it. The biggest joy I have found concerning designing is the wonderful people I have met face-to-face through the BSNH and virtually through the Internet. Once I learned more about beading, I started sharing what I knew through the Yahoo Group and the bead society, teaching classes there, at Michaels in Concord, NH, and at a new bead store in Laconia, NH, String 'Em Up Beads. Nothing compares to the happy look on a new beader's face when she or he learns a new technique and walks away with a beautiful piece of beadwork.

The biggest challenge I faced as a designer was learning how the different bead finishes would work together in a design. I am still learning how to do this better. My past interests influence me as I design, and many of my ideas come from the flowers in the garden, the memories I have of trips to the ocean, and my studies of history.

Bead crochet continues to be my favorite stitch. Colorful combinations of beads, or a simple tube of one color, the designs using bead crochet relax me, as once the beads are strung the beading becomes a way to relieve the stress of working on the dissertation. I have found that many of the skills I have developed as a bead designer apply to research design. Taking one idea from many and then putting the pieces together in a logical manner has helped me pull together the components of my research. I track beading references as well as the references I need for my dissertation. I write daily, keeping that skill honed. I apply past skills, such as embroidery to my beading, and illustrating diagrams, to both ventures.

My dining room has become more a bead shop than a dining area. My workspace is in the living room, where I bead every night watching television. My design studio is in the offices we have in our home, with a photography studio in one, and the computers in another. Besides The Bead Cellar Software, I use ACDSee to organize photos, EndNote to organize references, Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Illustrator CS2 to create illustrations and retouch photographs, as well as MS Word and Adobe Acrobat for publishing my designs. Kodak's Ofoto software publishes the photographs of my work to the Internet, Macromedia Dreamweaver helps me maintain websites I author, one being Need For Beads, and the other the BSNH website. Having organized a Delica bead swap to help designers put together color cards, I use MS Excel for that purpose. My eBay store, Need For Beads, also requires me to understand the software from eBay for maintaining that site. I use Quickbooks to manage the business side of Need For Beads.

My goals related to beadwork and designing for the next 5 years include having magazine articles and a beading book published, going beyond the publishing I have at bead-patterns.com. Part of the process of finishing my dissertation is overcoming the fear of publishing something that people will find boring. I work on developing my confidence through my interest in beads. The feedback I receive in the Yahoo group from those I have helped continues to be a vital source of encouragement to me. Becoming a better writer, bead designer, and business researcher continue to offer me my biggest personal challenges, and offer an avenue to increased accomplishments.

I currently work as an internal consultant for gold-and silver-mining companies in Concord, NH. These entrepreneurial companies make use of my varied skills, and I find the work exciting. The mines are in Brazil, so I am currently learning how to speak Brazilian Portuguese.

Sampling of Gail's Designs:
Click on an image to view the pattern information.