Her sunflowers require more than 10,000 beads, and can take up to six hours to make.
When Springfield crafter Patricia Giguere creates one of her life-size French beaded roses, she painstakingly strings 3,200 tiny glass beads on wire and then forms them into 25 varying size petals and finishes it with a wire and paper stem in about three hours.
Her sunflowers require more than 10,000 beads, and can take up to six hours to make.
Giguere, 60, creates more than 70 different patterns of beaded flowers, as well as a variety of headbands, hairclips and pins, as part of Chateau De Fleurs Beaded Flowers, which she operates out of her Wilbraham Road home.
Her craft started out as a hobby in the mid-1980s, including selling the beaded flowers at area gift shops. These days she no longer offers them at gift shops, but can be found selling her wares at craft shows in Massachusetts and Connecticut. She recently was at the Springfield Jewish Community Center's Artisan Festival.
Giguere’s introduction into craft beading came by chance. In the early 1980s, she wove cotton rugs and sold them at craft fairs, a skill that her father, the late John Connors, taught her when she was young. It was at one of the craft fairs, where Giguere met a fellow crafter who made decorative pillows. The woman had a host of glass beads that she never used, and gave them to Giguere.
Feeling that there were already enough beaded jewelry makers in the area, and not knowing what to do with them, Giguere said she searched online for ideas. She came across French beaded flowers, and was intrigued.
Some of these beaded flowers by Patricia Giguere of Springfield require 3,200 glass beads per flower. “I had never seen beaded flowers. It’s an old art, but nobody seems to do it anymore,” she said. “I bought a book on how to make them, and I taught myself.”
Giguere said she was attracted to creating flowers, because she has never had success keeping flowers and plants alive for very long.
“I have a black thumb. I’ve even killed a cactus,” she said. “I thought that flowers were beautiful and people would enjoy them. They won’t die and no watering needed.”
The mother of three and a grandmother, she began to expand beyond making flowers when another crafter at a fair in Connecticut last summer asked if she could buy a small beaded flower to add onto the headbands she was selling.
Patricia Giguere of Springfield expanded the types of beaded products she makes by adding bracelets and hair pins. “That Saturday night I used my imagination to make the flowers, without all the wires that would normally be used to hold the petals together. I made one, and brought it to her Sunday. She used a glue gun on a headband and she sold it within 10 minutes” she said.
The crafter ordered 25 more small flowers from Giguere, who decided that she, too, could make her own accessories with her flowers, such as pins and hairclips. At her next fair in Northfield she made five hairclips and sold all of them in five minutes, she said.
Giguere helps care for three of her grandchildren, so she works on her beaded crafts when they are in school or during other free time. An injury she suffered to her knee when she was hit by a car seven years ago makes it difficult for her to be on her feet for too long.
For Giguere’s craft, it’s less about making money and more about making people happy, she said.
“I like meeting people. And I like when they come over and comment on my flowers even if they don’t buy them,” she said.
For more information, email shop4dolly@msn.com, or call (413) 783-1540.