Ellery Yahia (Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz).

“When I was younger I used to make jewelry with my friend Bo Dunn,” Yahia said, a hobby they started together in sixth grade. Weekly trips to the Bead Hive on Ayer’s Main Street became a routine. The more Yahia visited the store, the more she found herself indulging in hours of creation. Soon enough, Yahia boasted an ever-growing collection of necklaces, bracelets, and earrings.

Eventually, an ample amount of inventory allowed Yahia to sell her jewelry at the Harvard flea market, which—much to her surprise—was a huge success. This feeling of achievement, combined with a new lure to higher quality pieces, ultimately drove Yahia to take her gift of creativity a bit further by generating a small-scale business right in her own home.

“I wasn’t planning on selling anything at first, but I kept making more and more pieces,” she said. “It’s a lot of fun creating original pieces and searching for interesting stones and beads online.”

Gradually, friends and family started dropping by the Yahia residence just to take a peek at the crafted items. In time it seemed like the perfect idea to design a website for customers (http://web.mac.com/elleryyahia) to view the selection from their own computers. “It isn’t the best of all websites. It is only based off of my computer, and the fonts and such look better if you have a Mac,” Yahia said. Just the same, the website offers her products more exposure, and it forced her to put together a name for her business: Elle Jewelry.

“I printed labels off of the computer and bought little red boxes to put the pieces in.” Yahia said. “The label design was just another step in the whole creative process, which I enjoy so much.”

As the business picked up speed last summer, Yahia, with the help of her mother, Melissa, found herself spending the majority of her time keeping her inventory up to par. “[My mom and I] got into the daily routine of sitting at the dining room table surrounded by baggies and boxes filled with beads spread across the 10-foot-long table into the wee hours of the night,” she said.

Yahia’s collection features beads that come anywhere from Ayer to China, via eBay. “Over the summer, my mom and I were regulars at Vintage Vogue [in Ayer], coming in at least once a day, five days a week, even if it was to get the smallest thing or a single bead,” she said.

“A lot of the pieces are very colorful and I think that inspiration comes from the summer weather and the fact that I like a lot of color. I buy a lot of very nice, and sometimes very expensive stones,” she said, adding that her first concern is to make jewelry that she herself would want to wear. “I put a lot of creative thought and time into designing each piece in a way that makes me want to keep each one,” she said. Her mother, she added, can usually describe the spiritual healing significance of each piece.

Yahia described the process of choosing names for each necklace, bracelet, or earring as one of the most exciting aspects of jewelry making. “Many of the names are places I’ve been to, seen, or experienced, and many names just pop into my mind when looking at the piece,” she said. Names like “Peppermint Passion,” “Swing the Blues,” “South Seas,” and “Twist and Shout” can all be found among the collection of Elle Jewelry.

“I hope to do a lot more this summer. I would like to keep the business going and see where it goes from there,” said Yahia. “I think it will always be a hobby and creative activity for me to jump into every once in a while. Besides, it increases my accessories wardrobe, and I can’t complain about that!”