❋ Grade: A Grade

❋ Color: White String with White & Purple Assorted Beads

❋ Materials: Nylon String & Assorted Beads

❋ Maedeup Dimensions: 

• 0.5 in. L x 8 in. H x .0.25 in. W

• 1.27 cm. L x 20.32 cm. H x 0.64 cm. W

I was taught Maedeup by ChungYoung Lee [my 81-year-old grandma, aka Professional Maedeup Artist/Teacher] in the summer of 2016 when I was 16 years old for about only 2 months when I visited South Korea to see my grandmother. Over the years, I have been honing my skills to create more original designs that fit into the modern trend and now I’m ready to share and sell my work globally, so everybody can enjoy, love, and learn about my heritage/culture.

Each Maedeup is made with the highest attention to quality and care; however, due to the nature of handmade items, the item size and overall shape may vary slightly and gentle use is highly recommended.

Maedeup takes a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to make. My grandma, younger sister, and I intensively use both hands to create the knots to perfection and we will once in a while use an Awl to help tighten and loosen the string to ease our hands. The process to make each Maedeup is extremely meticulous, labor intensive, complicated, and sadly very painful on the joints of the hands especially when you tighten the string to give that refined finish.

The strings are rare, high quality, and expensive. The strings specifically used to make the turtles are extremely more expensive because it's thick, specialized, luxury quality, rare, and handmade from only a few professionals in South Korea.