Marlene Butcher

Her Beads of Courage Journey

I wanted to share with you my journey with Beads of Courage. The making of these beads have kept me going through several challenging times in  my life.

I was at the Bead and Button Show in Milwaukee, walking through the marketplace looking at the various booths, when I came across one for Beads of Courage, manned by a single woman. I stopped to look and ended up chatting with Jean Gribbon, the founder of Beads of Courage, who explained to me about the programme. I was new to lampworking but felt  a strong connection to the concept, and I took away information on the guidelines and where to send the beads. Over the next few years, my boxes of beads were sent to the US BOC programme, and I got a thrill of excitement when I received a thank you message for my first donation.

An equivalent programme was set up in the UK by three families who had children with cancer. You can read how it was set up here .  Once I realised that there was a UK programme, I started sending beads there too.  

My work background is in healthcare. I am a radiographer and sonographer, and sometimes interact with very sick children. My job involves x-raying bones, and some of these children will have bone biopsies. This led to me setting myself a personal challenge to make as many bones beads as there are bones in the body.  I made 216 bone beads. A web search will tell you there are 206 bones in the body, but as a radiographer I know that individuals will have a varying number of sesamoid bones, so I chose to include 10 of these in my final number.  

On another occasion to help raise funds for BOC UK, I decided to ask my colleagues to sponsor a bead for £3.00. They could choose whether I made a bubble bead, a face bead or an alien bead that they could sponsor. Some of them got very confused when I said they couldn’t have the bead themselves, but we eventually all got on the same page, and I managed to raise over £200.00.

Another UK bead artist and staunch supporter of BOC UK organised a 24 hour bead-a-thon in 2012 and 2013 and invited other bead makers to come and cover shifts over the 24 hours. Some very accomplished bead artists attended this event. I volunteered for the early morning shift and turned up at about 3 am with hot chocolate and French pastries so everyone could have a delicious breakfast.  In later years a special open day was arranged for BOC families to come and see how the beads were made. It was a privilege to meet these families and some of the children, and see their strings of beads, and how delighted they were to show us their favourites.

2020 has been a tough year for everyone. In spite of all my good intentions of creating glass art, I was one of those people feeling unmotivated and lacking in enthusiasm. I challenged myself to take on line classes, and learn new techniques, only to find that  over time I was still losing my interest and passion, everything seemed too hard to do, too much of a challenge.  The only thing that I found I could do with any regularity was making beads for BOC. Sitting down and making special beads for someone else helped to give me purpose and made me feel happy. For that short time at the torch I could forget what else was going on in the outside world. I had especial fun making puppy beads from the tutorial that Marcy Lamberson shared.

At the end of 2020, I was speaking to other UK bead maker friends and we discussed the fact that there appeared to be a lack of recent UK BOC.  A late night chat resulted in BEADS OF COURAGE UK BEAD ARTISTS being born. The goal of this was to use the group as a way to inspire and support each other to make beads for BOC. 

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