Personal touch: These designers turn glass, sequins, metal yarn into handmade accessories

SINGAPORE – A return to tactile hobbies has put handcrafted goods and accessories back in the spotlight. The Straits Times meets three Singaporean accessories designers working with uncommon materials, whose unique creations make great gifting options for the season.

Sunnysde (@sunnysde_): Firing up a garden of glass charms

On a regular weekday afternoon, you can find Ms Chua Ming Hui at her studio in Bukit Batok playing with fire.

Armed with steel tools, lighters and a torch, the 30-year-old behind small jewellery label Sunnysde (pronounced “sunnyside”) holds a glass stick over an open flame and deftly twirls it around a rod called a mandrel. A red-hot globule falls off the stick and, while in liquid form, gets expertly sculpted into a doughnut, then a flower.

With a flat scraper, she carves out petals and finesses the smoothness, passing it back and forth through the flame a few times. The final product, a five-petalled flower in calming azure and green hues, gets deposited into a mini rice cooker filled with vermiculite to cool.

After amassing a garden’s worth of glass flowers, she pops them into a mini kiln to be strengthened at 500 deg C.

Almost two years into picking up a torch for the first time, Ms Chua is now a bona fide glass artist.

She was a crafty kid and used to help her mum Wang Pin Hua with craft activity booths at pasar malams. Ms Chua credits the 62-year-old, a furniture and jewellery wholesaler, as her role model who guided her through life.

When Ms Chua was deciding between a business degree and a career in the arts, her mother encouraged her to try the creative field. So she enrolled in Lasalle College of the Arts in 2015, completing a foundation programme before enrolling in the bachelor’s programme for Design Communication. She won two awards in her sophomore year.

After graduating in 2019, Ms Chua landed at travel booking platform Klook, doing graphic design and social media. Her day job was in digital design, but her heart lay in tactile craft.

In 2021, during the Covid-19 pandemic, she started a beaded jewellery business as a side hustle. One year in, she took the risk to quit her job and run Sunnysde full time.

Glass act

Her mother, who produces floral-themed costume jewellery for Gardens by the Bay, influenced her to go into floral-style jewellery. From the time she was young, Madam Wang would take her to jewellery fairs such as the Hong Kong International Jewellery Show to source for suppliers.

Madam Wang wanted her to help out with the family business, but Ms Chua protested that it “wasn’t her style”.

When she started her own venture, her mother advised her to do jewellery because it involved low inventory and higher profit margins. So she started with materials like plastic and acrylic, gradually upgrading to incorporate freshwater pearls, gemstones and glass charms.

Glass, in particular, was very well received. But because these charms were mass-produced, Ms Chua felt limited in her creative input. It was time to learn the art form herself.

In early 2024, she sought out pioneer glass and sand artist Tan Sock Fong to take lessons. Tan questioned her commitment, but Ms Chua proved her dedication over five months, learning the basics of torchwork and how to make simple shapes and patterns.

The endeavour cost her about $3,000 – a strain on her finances on top of renting booths at pop-ups. Until the end of 2023, she made no profits, relying on the support of her husband, who works in finance. The couple have no children.

Her first creative challenge was replicating the small flower charms she used to import. After weeks of trying to reverse-engineer the product, she finally solved the puzzle.

Over five months, she refined her designs – perfecting the thickness, consistency and post-processing – before launching the Fleur Bonbons collection in November 2024.

Teased on social media, the one-of-a-kind earrings were a hit online and marked what Ms Chua believes was a “mega turning point” in her business. She debuted them at festive market The Christmas Atelier. Soon, people began recognising them.

“Before the glass flowers were made by me, it felt wrong to call them mine. After I learnt how to make them, it created a stronger brand identity and ownership.”

The handmade pieces go for $46 for a charm, $78 for a necklace set and $98 for a pair of earrings.

She continued experimenting with glasswork and created Swiggle, a larger doodle-inspired flower made of hard glass (from $58 for a charm to $124 for an earring set).

Going green

Over time, Ms Chua has started incorporating sustainability practices into her handiwork.

Her teacher emphasised the safety in always cleaning up her work station after a session, telling her to throw away the small glass fragments left over. But finding it wasteful, she kept the different coloured shards. One day, she had the idea to melt them together.

“I wondered what I could do on my part, in my own little closed loop, to be sustainable.”

The result was glass flowers with multicoloured petals. She launched the collection as Re:Bloom Bonbons (same prices as Fleur Bonbons) in June.

Because hard and soft glass melt at different temperatures, combining both over open flame can be dangerous. They have exploded in her hands a few times, she admits, giving her small burns. She lost part of a fingerprint in the process.

But the final product is always worth it, says the cheerful crafter.

Now a pro, she has whittled down the time taken to make a piece from 30 minutes to five, although it still takes about two weeks to make a full collection of about 100 pieces. She sells them at pop-up events such as Public Garden, Green-House and The Christmas Atelier.

Her biggest challenge now is scaling the business. “People usually go from handmade works to mass-produced; I’m moving backwards. I’m still thinking how I can expand yet maintain creativity and the handmade element,” says Ms Chua. She is wary of outsourcing manufacturing to a factory, for fear of her designs being stolen.

Yet not once has she harboured thoughts of returning to the corporate world. The freedom of managing her own time is unrivalled. She has also met many customers-turned-friends on the job, who now help her at markets and in assembling jewellery.

In 2026, Ms Chua hopes to slow down the pace of pop-ups, to refine her craft and expand into new designs and lifestyle or homeware pieces. She is prototyping glass incense holders.

“I want to grow as an artist and not just a business. Through jewellery design, I found my home in the design community again.”

Teeteeheehee (@by.teeteeheehee): Sewing up coveted creations

She has tried almost every medium – from digital illustration to embroidery – and now, her hand-sewn earrings sell out in minutes. Each pair is a uniquely crafted assemblage of beads that sparkles at different angles in the light.

Needlework comes naturally to illustrator and embroidery artist Teresa Lim, better known on Instagram as Teeteeheehee. Crafting has always creatively and financially fed the 35-year-old, who has never held a full-time job.

The fashion textile design major from Lasalle College of the Arts found her passion for needle and thread in school. The medium has so much control, yet is forgiving if you make mistakes, she says. After graduating, she became a freelance illustrator.

She liked drawing girls and clothes, and made a living providing illustrated portraits at fashion events and festivals. This progressed into portraits of the embroidered kind, where she captured faces and pets in thread for weddings and other special occasions.

But these took too much time and effort (about 1½ weeks to make one) for too little money ($250 to $550). And then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, decimating the events industry and, with it, her paid projects.

Stuck at home with more time, she started experimenting with making her art more wearable.

The collector, who describes herself as a magpie drawn to shiny things, began stitching together the many beads and sequins she had amassed over the years. She turned them into earrings that she gave to friends, who wore them on Zoom calls.

The creations were a hit, and people online asked Ms Lim, who by then had a following on Instagram, to sell them. She first took orders over Instagram, accepting payment through PayNow.

By 2022, she could no longer handle the volume of orders over direct messages and built a website to host the designs.

These days, she launches a catalogue of four to seven new designs each month, with slots on an order form. As every piece is hand-stitched, she makes only up to 30 pairs a design. Pieces range from $88 to $230.

Each month, the slots sell out in minutes.

Her coveted order form opens every first week of the month, and she ships out her designs on the last week.

She describes her work as “different materials that come together to make harmony in a small space”.

“It’s fresh from my studio to your hands,” says Ms Lim, who works out of the home she shares with her husband, a research engineer, and two daughters, aged four and two.

Inspiration for her comes from everywhere – from a flower in the park to colours in the bead shop.

The avid reader is also inspired by characters in books. Two months ago, she created clam earrings in an ode to A Little Trickerie by Rosanna Pike, a work of historical fiction set in Tudor England. The protagonist folds herself up like a pearl to fit into small spaces as part of a circus act.

To make her earrings, she starts with a digital sketch to outline the form. Then beads, sequins, ribbons, wire and fabric trimmings come together on her tiny canvases. About half her materials are sourced from bead shops in Japan.

Smaller designs take 30 to 45 minutes a pair, while bigger pieces take up to two hours. She spends the bulk of her afternoons hunched over needle and thread while her daughters are at school.

It is back-breaking work, jokes Ms Lim, who has had to sign up for weekly chiropractor sessions.

The downside to such a hands-on trade is that scaling the business is tough. She has had to turn down invitations to do pop-ups at markets and fairs as she could not commit to the stock.

“I’m not doing this to grow. I make things to be worn by people,” says Ms Lim, who feels most fulfilled when she sees her earrings on customers. Despite selling only online, some of her customers are collectors who buy almost monthly and have proudly shown her their collections displayed in jewellery boxes.

“As a consumer myself, I appreciate the product more when I have to wait for it. These are mini art pieces.”

For 2026, she hopes to challenge herself by doing a pop-up as a solo exhibitor. She is also exploring new crafts, including mosaic art.

And her favourite part about being a jewellery designer?

“That I get to work with shiny things,” she says, eyes alight. “When the sun hits my studio, it’s so shiny. Going to work is like (being in) a playground.”

Studio Karyn Lim (@shop.karynlim): Weaving design knowhow with metal

For the low starting price of $40, you can wear an internationally exhibited designer’s creations on your ears.

Dainty wired earrings were never on 33-year-old industrial design-trained Karyn Lim’s bingo card. The Singaporean is better known for her furniture, which has been showcased at the likes of Milan Design Week and Designart Tokyo.

She stumbled into jewellery in 2022. In organic forms resembling coral reefs and flowers, the rings, earrings and brooches (from $42 to $56) woven from metal yarn look almost alive on the skin. And they weigh next to nothing.

Yet even in her journey as an industrial designer, she has always been unconsciously drawn to the fashion side of design. Her first product was a handbag.

Named Transformation Bags, the series of geometric bags with a semi-flexible membrane made of plywood and fabric was showcased at Milan Design Week in 2015. This was in a showcase held in the Triennale di Milano, a prestigious design museum.

It was a coup for the then 23-year-old, who was in her final year at the National University of Singapore. Today, she has a day job teaching design thinking at a tertiary institution.

Spending a semester abroad in the cultural centre of Paris cemented her decision to pursue a career in design. Upon graduating, she started working at home-grown design firm Industry+ as a communication executive. While picking up business skills at work, she joined design competitions and open calls on the side.

She furthered her studies with a master’s at the Lausanne University of Art and Design in Switzerland, graduating in 2020.

Her first furniture collection was a series in 2020 called Cloud, a line of gently rounded plywood seats. The stools were used as furniture within the Shiok! Cafe in the Singapore Pavilion at the recent World Expo in Osaka.

Over the years, she has dabbled in other mediums, including graphic work, and artificial intelligence art and spatial design.

She also continued to play with fashion. She designed two clothing capsules in collaboration with local fashion brand Barehands. In 2022, she launched wired handbags.

That was born from a 2022 exhibition Ms Lim staged for her series Lightness, comprising sculptural vessels of copper wire woven by hand.

Presented at the first edition of Emerge at Find Design Fair Asia, the metal mesh sculptures inspired her to create functional bags in the same style, but woven from stainless steel to be hardier.

The bags (priced from $189 to $319), now produced regularly, are sold at the Ion Orchard store of local fashion brand In Good Company, which also featured them in its September fashion show at the National Gallery Singapore.

Multidisciplinary maker

Earrings, she reiterates, were a fluke. In 2022, submitting her Lightness series, Ms Lim was accepted in the debut edition of shopping event Boutique Fairs’ Young Designers Showcase Grant, which aims to nurture the next generation of designers.

She fretted about needing something small, under $50, to sell at the fair. So she landed on earrings, in the same wire style and a softer metallic yarn. “Similar visual aesthetic, but very different techniques and materials.”

Customers enjoyed seeing her craft the earrings on the spot at Boutique Fairs and she started an Instagram page to take orders.

Most of the pieces are made to order, “off-the-cuff without patterns”, says Ms Lim, although key motifs include corals, circles and flowers. Some are available at the Red Dot Design Museum Shop.

Wire pieces have inevitably become her signature.

Her “itchy hands” push her to experiment with making new shapes out of metal yarn. The material is low cost, light – which makes it suitable for voluminous forms – and can be teased into multiple shapes in minutes, which is why she is partial to it. Lately, she has been finding ways to incorporate pearls.

Her formal design training has come in handy. She finds her eye for design guides her exploration of form and how materials play together.

Asked how long it takes to make a piece, she says: the answer is anywhere from minutes to hours. “Every stitch takes time. And it goes beyond that. It’s also the person’s creativity and their life experience that influence the design. Perhaps the value is more in the design than material cost or man hours.”

Declining to call herself a jewellery designer out of respect for the craft, the mother of an 18-month-old girl notes that she approaches accessories very differently from furniture.

“With my furniture, I’m more intentional about where it sits in the landscape of furniture design.”

Earrings are less stressful, she quips.

Her favourite part is connecting with her customers. Some came to In Good Company’s booth at the November edition of Boutique Fairs, which she sat out of, in search of her accessories.

“People still enjoy meeting the maker, something we lose with big brands,” says Ms Lim.