The soft clinks of beads fills the air as she carefully threads each one onto a thin string, her eyes carefully following each colorful bead as it slides through the string. Each bead is thoughtfully picked and perfectly placed in a pattern inspired by her love for the ocean, the sea life and the season of summer. She was absorbed into what she loved doing, completely out of this world. This isn’t just jewelry, it’s her way of escaping reality when it feels heavy.
Junior Haya Khan’s journey of making jewelry began as a simple love for creating, which eventually grew into something much bigger. She started by making gifts for friends and family. Though she first started crafting when she was around five years old, it was during the summer before eighth grade when she realized she could turn her simple passion into a small business. She began sharing her art with her loved ones while expressing her own creativity.
“It’s just something I enjoy, and I always liked to make things for others so I thought I would carry on with that,” she said.
Using tiny seed beads of multiple colors, Khan transforms her ideas into beautiful jewelry. While jeweleries like simple bracelets can be finished in 25 to 30 minutes, more detailed pieces with chains or adjustable parts take additional time and dedication.
“I usually just think of them on the spot,” she said.
Though making jewelry can be time consuming, Khan finds joy in every single step. Each of her pieces symbolizes her personality and memories, all inspired by her experience during summer where she used to spend most of her time shelling with her grandfather. Sometimes her designs don’t go as planned but she remains collected, patient and inspired and improves with every piece she creates.
“Having enough patience for every creation and not getting frustrated over spending a lot of time on an idea for it to not even work out in the end is one of the biggest challenges,” she said.
Seeing her loved ones and others wearing her creation brings her an immense amount of joy and pride.
“It makes me so happy,” Khan said. “I feel overjoyed when people wear the jewelry I made because that means someone other than myself likes what I create.”
For her, creating these pieces is more than a hobby. It’s her way of expressing herself, sharing her creativeness, and staying connected to the things and the people she loves.
“Being creative means being unique,” she said. “It means to be yourself and not follow the crowd.”
As she continued to thrive and find her voice as an artist, her view on creativity became more focused on patience, trusting the process and being completely fine with not knowing everything. She understands that it is very overwhelming while starting out as you are always unsure of your route, but believes that these are the progressive steps of the journey.
“Everything has its own process, which you’re not going to know when you just start out,” Khan said. “My advice would be to go with the flow, have patience, stay disciplined, and believe in yourself even if the people around you don’t, because the end goal is for you, not for anyone else. Your opinion is the only one that matters and should influence your decisions.”
