My name is Nadra Holmes – welcome to my Etsy shop! I have been designing and making jewelry for about 10 years now. I’ve always loved making things and working with my hands – cooking is my other great passion and I’ve realized that my cooking process is very similar to the way I create a new design for a necklace. I see an ingredient in the market, maybe some beautifully ripe tomatoes or a blood orange, and I start thinking about how to center a meal around it, just as I start with a particular color or shape of bead or strand of gems that has caught my eye, and then begin to weave a design around it.

For many years I was a film editor. Editing film is also a very hands-on job, very visual, and involves telling a story about something or someone. When creating a piece of jewelry, one is also telling a story – the story of who will wear that piece and how they will wear it – what kind of person will it appeal to? Is it casual or formal? Is their personal style bold or understated? It is also the story of the artist making it – why those particular stones or elements? What do they evoke for the maker? What life experiences have influenced his/her design aesthetic? I lived in Lebanon during my formative teen and young adult years, and the aromas of spice and pine, rich colors and intricate patterns of Islamic art, and natural beauty of the mountains and the Mediterranean Sea have certainly infused my own personal aesthetic in many ways. Stone and metal come from the earth, and I love feeling connected to the collaboration between the earth’s natural beauty (raw stones, wood, and metallic elements) and humans (who recognize the potential in that raw state and refine it in different ways) to create beauty in our world.

The name I choose, NightGardenDesign, comes from the English translation of my twin daughters’ Arabic names – Leila, “leyl” means “night” or “dark beauty”, and Jenan which means “garden”, as in the Garden of Eden or paradise. Night gardens are rare (which is the meaning of my name, Nadra), beautiful, fragrant, and somewhat mysterious. I love all those connotations and the feeling that my daughters are with me every day in my work. I hope that my designs give you as much pleasure as I have enjoyed in creating them.