It started on a Friday nobody wanted to be at

In JSS1, vocational training was compulsory. Every Friday, after fellowship, until half past four. Elisheva’s proprietress ran a bead business on the side, so while other schools were teaching knots and knitting, hers was teaching beads.

She was good at it. Good enough that she started making her own jewellery for family functions, and her grandmother’s too. That is how a twelve-year-old ends up as the reason an entire compound is colour-matched at a naming ceremony.

Then life happened, the way it does. School. Professional induction. And afterwards, that particular Nigerian purgatory: waiting months for an internship placement, with time and nothing to put it into.

So in 2024 she bought beads. This time not for jewellery but for bags, which she had never made and did not know how to make. What followed was YouTube at unreasonable hours, a great deal of trial, rather more error, and the specific misery of weaving four thousand beads, spotting a mistake in row three, and loosening the whole thing back down to start again.

“I am not selling bags. I am selling the six days it took, and the fact that no one else has this one.”

Bead & Bloom turns two on the first of October. Every piece still begins on the same table in Lagos: a colour, a pattern counted out by memory, and days of quiet, deliberate work.