Meet your 2025 Bead Cruise Instructors

Beki Haley

Beki  has been in love with beads for over 50 years now. She was introduced to the amazing art form of seed bead weaving by her grandmother when she was a child. That early start in exploring the intricacy and fine detail that can be attained with seed beads has stayed with Beki throughout her life. Even as a young teen, Beki loved teaching others all the beautiful things that can be created with beads. She has over 36 years of teaching experience in several different venues from large auditorium settings to intimate one-on-one classes and everything in between.

Training as a classic silversmith at a young age gave Beki an appreciation and understanding of the art and beauty of jewelry design. Beki uses those formal skills to teach the technical aspects of jewelry design. In her classes, the students learn the importance of attention to detail and craftsmanship while exploring their natural creativity. During any stressful time in her life, Beki turns to her beads for comfort and calm. The meditative action of beading is the perfect tool to bring peace and joy to her otherwise busy and chaotic life. Sharing that joy by teaching others how to create with beads is a blessing beyond measure.

Learn more about Beki from her Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/beki.haley

Or websites:
www.BekiHaley.com 
www.BeadersDreamRetreat.com

Kinga Bledsoe

Kinga Bledsoe was born in 1980, in Hungary. At 19, she packed up her life in a backpack and moved to the US where she has been residing since, albeit not at the same place. She currently lives in Boulder, Colorado with her boyfriend  and furbabies Samantha Regina Nichols and Marley. Samantha Regina is not only her muse but her model as well. Many of Kinga's best known pieces were popularized by the canine model.

 One way or another Kinga has been always making things, which started turning into a career when she was painting murals at the time she lived in New York. The murals were fun, but  she did not feel like painting was her calling. Eventually she picked up a bead and Button magazine in 2007, found a bead embroidery project, and slowly but surely the obsession took over. 

After that first project, she started creating her own designs and quickly found her own distinctive voice that allowed her to translate her imaginings into beadwork. Kinga is always brainstorming, and her imagination provides an endless supply of fanciful ideas that she translates into bead embroidery. 

Her work first got noticed in the first Battle of the Beadsmith, quickly followed by her being a BeadDreams finalist in 2013 and getting 3rd place in the same competition in the Swarovski category in 2014, and a book feature in Marcia Decoster Presents, 2014. In 2015 she won first place in the crystal category in BeadDreams. She has done a number of instructional bead embroidery videos for Interweave publishing in 2016 and 2017, and has been featured in magazines in the US and Europe.

 In 2013 she started teaching and she hopes to continue this as her chosen profession for a long time to come, not only passing on beady knowledge, but perhaps her unique way of looking at the world as a magical place filled with endless possibilities.

Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/shop/crimsonfrog
Blog: http://crimsonfrogdesigns.blogspot.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kinga.bledsoe

Jayashree Paramesh

Jayashree Paramesh was introduced to the world of beads through a bead embroidery class she took while a student at Parsons, The New School for Design, New York. She looks everywhere for inspiration and then creates from within. Her designs are more about her desire to bring out the unique beauty of the beads and the woman, rather than having a signature style. That being said, she is inspired by fine jewelry and loves to use some gold or silver in her pieces. Sparkly crystals and gemstones in jewel-tones are her favorites.

She has been beading for about 14 years. Her designs have been published in Perlen Poesie, Beadwork, Bead and Jewellery Magazine and Bead and Button. She has taught and continues to teach at various studios and stores across the USA and abroad, Bead and Button Shows, exclusive bead retreats, bead cruises and Bead Guilds. It is a very gratifying experience for her to share her designs with fellow bead artists. To see more of her work, and purchase her kits and tutorials, please visit www.nchantme.com

Happy Beading!

Gail Crosman Moore

Gail Crosman Moore - multi- medium designer, teacher and photographer with an eye for the unusual and beautiful realm of Nature.

There is a richness on many levels regarding Gail’s rudimentary forms of inspiration. Pods, eggs, seeds and seashells serve to hide, conceal and protect a vulnerable interior as it offers unseen potential: opening doors to hope, beauty and mystery.

 Gail’s pieces come from a place where biology and botany might meet time travel. Seeds, pods, bones, cocoons, shells, cells and eggs; the evidence of lives previously lived or in the process of becoming, are some of what capture her attention and drive her to interpret the forms that embody the essence of emergence, evolution and potential. It’s the yin-yang, push-pull, hard-soft, shiny-mat, cold-warm dichotomy that intrigues her and calls her to juxtapose many different materials. Everything starts with a seed, a thought, an action. Her body of work has grown out of that inspiration and imagery for many years, starting with an education in horticulture which set the stage for a lifetime of honoring this basic life form. She uses the pod as metaphor to illustrate the exceptional phases of life. Pods house seeds and hidden potential. Seeds emerge into life, meant to reproduce. Life fades, husks decay and are reclaimed by the earth. This full circle serves to enrich her personal experience and emboldens her to share what she has learned and practiced with students the world around.

 She can be found exhibiting at craft shows that have included The Smithsonian Craft Show, The Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show and The League of New Hampshire Craft Shows as well as various Bead Shows worldwide.

Teaching where invitations take her including Japan, Lithuania, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, The Netherlands and The Bahamas all add to a rich pool of visual resource and wonderful human connections.
www.gailcrosmanmoore.com
https://gail.bigcartel.com
Etsy: VenerableElements

Sheila Schanne

Sheila Schanne began beading over 25 years ago and has been designing, writing patterns, and teaching for the past 11 years in her daughter’s LBS, Beads To Live By in Jackson, MI.

Her favorite things for designing are seed bead weaving, bead embroidery and resin. She is married with two awesome kids and a great son-in-law. They have four rescue dogs and her other big hobby is growing Native plants and trees and raising butterflies.