Ab Initio

I began Faire Treasures as a little side project while I was finishing up my BFA in photography at Texas State University. My first idea was actually to make purses and cloaks, giving me a good excuse to sew items I couldn’t justify making for myself. I had started building my pirate costume at this point and was trying to collect the perfect accessories for my look. I searched for beads large enough to fit over a small braid in my hair, but I kept finding the perfect beads that were much too small. Realizing that a removable strand of beads would work much better for repeated wearings, the first strand of Pirate Hair Jewels was created!

Thing was, I had to buy many sets of beads to get the mix I wanted for my strand. My idea had been that a pirate wouldn’t have had a full set of similar beads. He or she would have collected these trinkets over a long period of time, so although they should go together, they shouldn’t necessarily match. Then of course I wanted to keep away from plastic beads, trying to use what could have been available then: glass, shell, stone, wood, horn, bone, and metal. Collecting so many of each for just one strand wasn’t practical, so I decided to make more and offer them for sale through a site my sister had set up a shop on, a site called Etsy. I opened up my shop “CrystalKittyCat’s Faire Treasures” in July of 2007. Since then I have been selling my Pirate Hair Jewels to people around the world.