“I enjoyed watching my mother design jewelry and often went with her to craft shows and suppliers to buy materials,” Lisa says. “It was so exciting for me, and I think that’s why I always wanted to be an artist.”

After studying jewelry making in college, Lisa went to Paris for a year, where she made her first bag, almost accidentally. “I couldn’t make jewelry there because I had no way of soldering metal,” she recalls. “I wanted to work with the materials I was comfortable with, so I started stringing beads on wire.”

(a) “In the year I lived in Paris, I worked in a little store and sold wholesale fashion accessories. I’ve always felt an affinity for the French.” (b) Lisa’s bags are made of knitted and crocheted mesh decorated with beaded wire.

(c) Lisa found this turn-of-the-century encyclopedia of women’s crafts, while scouring Parisian bookshops for ideas. “The book inspired me. The kind of work it depicts—the needlepoint, the embroidery—is so beautifully sophisticated. In a lot of ways, we’ve lost that. We don’t work with our hands the way those women did because we have so many other, less creative ways of filling our time, like watching TV.” Lisa has modeled some of her purses on patterns she found in this book and others like it that fill her studio.

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