For Kristi Puszkar, beading is more than a hobby — it’s a life philosophy.
“When you are beading, you need to think of the intention of each bead. Every tiny bead has a story and lends itself to the end product,” she says.
“Each individual bead plays a role in the bigger initiative, so you need to plan and place it carefully in order for the bigger picture to come together.”
Puszkar has admired and collected individual beads since she was a child, well before she learned how to work with them.
“I would see a beautiful bead in the store and want it, but I never knew what to do with it,” she says. “It wasn’t until 2021 that my mom and I worked with a local Elder who taught us how to do beadwork.”
Puszkar says she connected with the art form immediately.
“Working with beads engages my whole brain and keeps my hands busy,” Puszkar says. “It makes me think of colours and textures and allows me to bring my whole body together into the zone, which lets me turn off everything else and reconnect with what matters.”
Puszkar says she knew she was Métis growing up in Manitoba, but she wasn’t allowed to celebrate it. When she moved to Alberta in 2010, she started to connect with her Indigenous background, including cultural art forms like beading.
The May 2021 discovery of 215 unmarked graves of children at a residential site in Kamloops, B.C., impacted her in a profound way.
“My kids were four and two at the time and knowing that it could have been my child in one of those graves destroyed me,” Puszkar says.
As a social worker with a minor in psychology, she decided she needed to do something, so she tried her hands at designing and making orange-shirt beaded pins for the kids in her children’s day care. “It was my call to action to give back,” she says.
And that’s just what Puszkar did, creating Silver & Ivy Beads, an online store that donates 20 per cent of product sales to non-profit organizations. So far, she has raised money for the Canadian Red Cross, World Central Kitchen for Ukrainian Refugees, Orange Shirt Society and many more organizations.
“We were poor growing up and we leaned on non-profits like these for support,” she says.
Puszkar estimates that she has given about $5,000 to various charities since starting Silver & Ivy in 2021. She adds that customers can choose which charity the money from their purchase goes towards.
She says beading has a very strong cultural significance, but anyone can wear the pieces.
“Beadworks [are] for anyone. The pieces are meant to be worn; that’s why we make them,” Puszkar says. “You don’t have to be Indigenous to wear the beadwork. The importance of our culture and where beading comes from runs through every bead and piece of thread. We use beadwork to tell stories. By wearing it, you are keeping that story alive.”
Puszkar has also created pins and ribbons for the Airdrie anti-bullying campaign, as well as for the REDress Project, fundraisers for various types of cancer and Pride Month.
“I have family members in the 2SLGBTQIA+ community and they are all in different stages of comfort in their identity,” she says. “I wanted to let them know that I am an ally and that I love them, regardless of how they want to be addressed.
“That is the power of these pins. One tiny pin on someone’s shirt can show another person that they are safe to talk to if they need somebody. It is so small, but so big at the same time. You are one person, but you can be everything to someone else. Each individual plays a role in the bigger picture.”
Thank you to Kristi for creating this beautiful version of our logo for us to honour our Indigenous community.
Check out the Silver & Ivy website at silverandivybeads.com.
