- January 11, 2025
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Carol Smith enjoys creating paper beads. She said it is a stress reliever for her, and helps with the pain in her hands affected by osteoarthritis. Photo Jacque Estes
Carol Smith rolls a recycled Christmas card onto a special tool to make paper beads. Her left hand doesn't have full mobility due to osteoarthritis. Photo Jacque Estes
All recycled materials. from left, an Arizona Tea can, a comb, and two examples of quilling. Photo Jacque Estes
Carol Smith wears jewelry she makes out of recycled paper. The craft is part of her personal therapy for her osteoarthritis. Photo Jacque Estes
Carol Smith looks carefully at the packages in the grocery store because she knows soon, she might be wearing them.
Smith may glance at the sugar and fat content, but her focus is on the package colors.
Smith creates earrings, necklaces and bracelets, her own designs, out of everything from dog food boxes to old Christmas cards. Occasionally she incorporates other materials into her creations, like the light-weight discs she punches out of Arizona ice tea cans.
Her left hand doesn’t completely close around the very thin, wooden, dowel-type tool she is wrapping the paper around – it can’t. She was diagnosed with osteoarthritis several years ago.
Before the diagnosis she suspected she might have the disease since it runs in her family.
“My hands were swelling,” she said. “I was in denial for a long time. Suddenly I couldn’t bend them and it was worse in cold weather. It was really bad.”
Not wanting to turn to pain medication early she looked for alternative ideas.
She saw paper beads in a magazine and wondered how they were created and immediately decided to teach herself the craft. That was three years ago.
“After I was diagnosed I thought, ‘I have got to do something,’’ she said. “I decided I was going to try it (paper beads), and low and behold I was able to do it.”
Smith, a nurse in the radiation oncology lab at Florida Hospital Flagler, knows stress can contribute to medical problems.
“It’s a great stress reliever and it keeps my fingers nimble. It puts me in a different place, which in turn helps the arthritis,” she said. “If I don’t use them I am going to lose them.”
She hasn’t told her doctor about her self-therapy method but plans to do so.
Her recycled wonders are often given as gifts, though she also sells them at Southeast Jewelry in Flagler Beach. She is always on the lookout for packaging with turquoise colors to match her hospital uniform.
“For me it’s a therapy craft,” she said.
To push her limits, she also creates jewelry using a quilling method, an intricate art form that uses strips of special paper to roll and shape into decorative designs.
It’s the idea of using recycled materials to create jewelry that appeals to her the most.
“I love recycling,” she said. “You see them and you don’t know what it was. It’s opened up my imagination.”
