Personal touch

These designers turn glass, sequins and metal yarn into handmade accessories

- Amanda Chai Style Correspondent

Sunnyside founder and glass artist Chua Ming Hui with the jewellery she makes by hand.

(ST PHOTOS: AZMI ATHNI)

A return to tactile hobbies has put handcrafted goods and accessories back in the spotlight.

The Straits Times meets three Singaporean accessories designers working with uncommon materials, whose unique creations make great gifting options for the season.

On a regular weekday afternoon, you can find Ms Chua Ming Hui at her studio in Bukit Batok playing with fire.

Armed with steel tools, lighters and a torch, the 30-year-old behind small jewellery label Sunnysde (pronounced "sunnyside") holds a glass stick over an open flame and deftly twirls it around a rod called a mandrel. A red-hot globule falls off the stick and, while in liquid form, gets expertly sculpted into a doughnut, then a flower.

With a flat scraper, she carves out petals and finesses the smoothness, passing it back and forth through the flame a few times. The final product, a five-petalled flower in calming azure and green hues, gets deposited into a mini rice cooker filled with vermiculite to cool.

After amassing a garden's worth of glass flowers, she pops them into a mini kiln to be strengthened at 500 deg C.

Almost two years into picking up a torch for the first time, Ms Chua is now a bona fide glass artist.

She was a crafty kid and used to help her mum Wang Pin Hua with craft activity booths at pasar malams. Ms Chua credits the 62-year-old, a furniture and jewellery wholesaler, as her role model who guided her through life.

When Ms Chua was deciding between a business degree and a career in the arts, her mother encouraged her to try the creative field. So she enrolled in Lasalle College of the Arts in 2015. She won two awards in her sophomore year.