Beadwork (embroidery) in Europe goes back centuries. This site deals with the European medieval period, roughly 1000 to 1700AD, exclusively.

Jen Funk Segrest of Enon, Ohio has been documenting and researching European beadwork spanning the 10th to 17th centuries for over 30 years.

She started as a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, an international medieval re-creation and resesrch non-profit organization, in the early 90’s and began researching beadwork within the time period and… Promptly found little to no information. So she started hunting for it.

MedievalBeads.com was started as an information store house for photos and item information of bead embroidery in the covered centuries. Twenty-five years later this website now holds over 200 examples of beadwork. 120 of those being extant examples – most hidden from public view in museum store rooms – making it the largest single resource on the topic.

Jen invites anyone to contact her using the contact page or the pop up tool in the lower right corner on any page using a number of methods.

Notes about the sources on this site: I tend to feature examples of seed-sized glass and pearl beads sewn onto cloth, parchment, or worked with wire, as larger pearls decorating cloth are much more commonly found.

I prefer to provide as many extant examples as possible. I often reject paintings for inclusion if they feature plain, simple pearl work or the like. Unless they are portraits, of course, as portraits (of real people, not saints) always are always better.