The beauty of her beads wins Maui artisan loyal buyers

When handcrafted, artisanal beads speak to your soul so loudly they’re practically shouting, you buy them.

At least, your columnist does.

The same likely is true for the many customers of Maui-based Aloha Bead Co. Inc. because owner and artisan Sarah Klopping has supported herself with her art all her adult life.

“I’ve been a seed bead artist almost 38 years,” she said of using the tiny beads that most people think of when they hear the word “beads.”

Once people get into beading, an entire universe of beads opens up, as it did for Klopping.

The stars of Klopping’s solar system are her handmade, artisanal lampwork glass beads, which she has been making for the past 17 years.

“It’s a form of alchemy,” she said. “You have to know where to be in the flame at the right time, for the right glass.”

“Lampworking is an old, ancient art that was started before Christ, in Mesopotamia, which is (now) Iraq,” she said. Practitioners of the art in the early days used oil lamps, and would use a bellows to pump air onto the lamp “to make it burn hotter around a copper wire,” she said. “Now, of course, we use high-tech torches using oxygen and propane.”

She describes herself as an intermediate-level lampworker, as she still is learning. Klopping traveled to Italy to study the craft.

Klopping uses slabs of glass and combines them to make canes, ribbons and other elements for bead-making. She then melts the glass canes or other elements she has crafted onto a mandrel, or metal rod, “and wraps the hot glass around the mandrel” to make her artisanal beads.

Klopping uses a variety of Italian and German art glass, double-helix glass which contains silver, 22-karat gold leaf, silver foil, goldstone and dichroic glass to make her creations.

Even the simple beads have intricately melted dots of silver or glass bits around them, while others appear to have numerous layers of different types of glass, some luminous from the inside, others with different colors of glass swirled around in floral or other designs.

She still works with mass-produced beads from around the world, incorporating those and her handcrafted beads into jewelry she designs.

Her garden bracelets are so popular, as are matching earrings and leather wrap bracelets, that she has constructed kits for sale so people can make their own. A tutorial without supplies for the leather wrap bracelet sells for $11.95 in her online Etsy shop, while a kit for a garden-style bracelet complete with beads, including some handmade by Klopping, sells for $95. Kits with strictly manufactured beads sell for $89. Earring kits are $42 or $45, depending on whether the metal parts are gold-filled or sterling silver.

Klopping can assemble one of her garden-style bracelets in four hours.

Button enthusiasts might be excited to learn that she also carries Victorian buttons dating from 1880 to the early 1900s and is a member of the National Button Society.

Beads in her store range from $2.25 to $75, and she sells to many isle jewelry designers who make their own creations that they sell at craft fairs and wholesale.

She doesn’t sell at the Made in Maui County Festival, she said, because “I’m not out there competing with my customers.” The annual Whole Bead Show is the only sales event she participates in on Oahu.

She teaches beginning lampwork in her studio. “I don’t teach a big class; I teach one-on-one,” she said. Klopping also offers other classes and workshops, for different prices depending on the project.

She came to Hawaii in about 1987, she said, responding to a classified ad for a job on Hawaii island. That didn’t work out, but through the network of local people she met, she moved to Maui where she learned beading in a community above Ulupalakua.

“Everybody up there was beading,” she said. People started asking if they could buy her beadwork, and from there her livelihood was born.

“I was not on welfare, and I supported myself, had kids and supported my kids on beading,” she said. A member of the former Pacific Handcrafters Guild and a member of the Maui Crafts Guild for some 20 years, she rented her present space from the guild’s artists cooperative. The guild, still in existence, moved when the building was sold.

“The owners put their own store in and kept me on,” she said. Klopping is in the shop three days a week and is busy producing beads and making jewelry the other four days a week in her studio. She also personally handles e-commerce operations and fulfillment for her Etsy shop.

“Buy Local” each Aloha Friday is about made-in-Hawaii products and the people who make them. Reach Erika Engle at 529-4303, erika@staradvertiser.com or on Twitter as @erikaengle.