When Kami Fasan’s daughter, Claire, was a baby, she wore an amber teething necklace.
Used as a natural remedy for centuries in Europe, the beaded necklaces have caught on in North America in recent years. Proponents believe the beads release minute amounts of naturally-occurring succinic acid, which has an analgesic and anti-inflammatory effect when absorbed by the body.
One day, Claire’s necklace broke and Fasan says she noticed a difference in her daughter’s level of discomfort. Being a crafty person, the North Vancouver resident ordered some amber beads and made a new necklace. With the leftover materials, she made herself one too.
“I wore a necklace wrapped around my wrist as a bracelet to bed for a few nights in a row,” Fasan says, explaining she had pain and swelling in her wrists from doing a lot of sewing at the time. “The more I wore the amber, the better my wrists felt.”
Fasan soon started making amber necklaces for friends and local moms. Five years ago, she launched Full Moon Mothering, a line of Baltic amber and gemstone jewelry for adults and children. All her amber is sourced from family-run businesses in Lithuania, since the Baltic variety contains a high concentration of succinic acid, she says.
“It’s kind of like nature’s homeopathic Advil.”
Many of Fasan’s jewelry designs incorporate other gemstones that are thought to have their own healing properties.
“Amethyst, for example, is traditionally associated with calming the mind so it balances both sides of the brain and promotes a very calm meditative state,” she says. “Turquoise has a very long history of being used for arthritic pain.”
In addition to her amber and gemstone creations, Fasan also makes custom DNA keepsake jewelry to commemorate births, deaths, and important milestones. This side of her business was inspired by her grandfather’s death.
“His passing brought together members of my family that hadn’t been in the same room together for more than a decade and I wanted to do something that honoured that,” Fasan says.
She asked the funeral home to set aside a small amount of his ashes and used resin to preserve the ashes in colourful beads, which she gave to her relatives as mementos.
After that, Fasan started making keepsake jewelry for moms. Examples of organic material she has turned into jewelry include dried umbilical cords, dried and encapsulated placentas (known as placenta pills), and dried pieces of the amniotic sac. She uses resin to preserve the material as beads, pendants and rings, adding colour and sparkle to her customer’s liking. For a more discrete look, she might place the keepsake material inside a vial or locket. It’s a way to reinvent something that might otherwise live inside a baggie at the back of a mother’s drawer for years.
“It just kind of sits there, along with baby’s first tooth and baby’s lock of hair and all of these things that, let’s face it, they’re kind of macabre and they’re kind of gross, but the memory is still special.”
Creating custom keepsake jewelry isn’t a process Fasan takes lightly.
“The stories that I get with the custom orders, they’re very special, and I’m often quite honoured at how open and truthful people are with me,” she says.
For that reason, she makes a point of working on only one keepsake item at a time.
“It’s what I call sacred work and I want to be respectful of the person’s ashes that I’m working with or respectful with the brand new little baby,” she says. “Only when that one is done, packed up, shipped, and reached its new owner do I move on to the next piece.”
Fasan’s jewelry is available at fullmoonmothering.com. She also sells her designs at craft fairs and will be a vendor at PumpkinFest in West Vancouver on Oct. 2.
