On November 13th we had a guest presenter in the classroom. It was Noelle Pepin, who created the project called “beaded tweets”. Noelle explained that this was a project based in research on binary coding language and connecting it to beading, specifically loom beading. These two seemingly unconnected disciplines were combined by Noelle to honour both Western and Indigenous traditions.
Noelle did a small presentation on how beaded tweets was developed, how it worked, and how students received it in the classroom. I enjoyed how Noelle brought the contemporary and the traditional together to make something completely new. Then we got a chance to bead our own binary message. Considering that some of us were inexperienced at beading and we didn’t have too much time, we did a simple one string message instead of using a loom.
You start by creating your message and choosing two different colour beads to be the ones and zeros. It was a bit complicated, but I got the hang of it shortly after. I chose pink and purple as my colours, which looking back now wasn’t the best because the beads are pale and look like all one colour. We were told to think positively while we beaded, as our energy would go into our bead work. I thought this was a really fun activity, and enjoyed my beading experience.
Photo credit: Maddie Corbett, July 2024.
