Have you seen a bag of beadwork? A woman in Inuvik is looking for it.
Somewhere in Inuvik there is a bag with four beaded vests and 15 beaded uppers, and Ruth Wright is frantically trying to find it.
She lost the uppers and vests sometime in the last few weeks, but she doesn't even know what type of bag the missing garments are in.
"I do have short-term memory loss," said Wright. "I don't even know where they are or what they're in."
'Not a good beader'
She's been working to make the garments for her daughter's wedding in September.
Originally she planned to make one vest for her ex-partner to wear while walking their daughter down the aisle. But then he couldn't go to the wedding.
Wright's daughter decided her brothers could walk her down the aisle instead.
"So I started two more vests," she said.
Then Wright had a conversation with her sister, who told her that it is Gwich'in tradition to bead slippers for the wedding party.
"I'm not a good beader," said Wright, who ultimately decided she would make the slippers anyway.
She said she's slow because she uses one needle and two beads at a time. And she's worked on the uppers and vests for "hours and hours."
A little bit of hoarding
Before they went missing, she had finished the outlines of flowers on the uppers, but she hadn't filled them in yet.
"I was going to have a beading party and have a bunch of friends come over and fill everything in and put them together," said Wright.
She realized the bag of garments was gone after she tried to show them to her great aunt.
Since then, she's been on the hunt for her missing work. She's gone everywhere — to local businesses, friends' houses, she even called CBC to issue a public notice.
The vests could even be in Wright's house.
"Anybody out there knows me, I'm a little hoarder," she said.
She has come up with a back-up plan in case she can't find the bag of garments before the wedding. She said that while she was searching her home for the uppers and vests, she found one metre of stroud cloth — a thick wool fabric strong enough to support beadwork.
She'll bring that to Fort McPherson to get the flowers embroidered onto the slippers.
Have you seen a bag of beadwork in Inuvik? Email jamie.malbeuf@cbc.ca and she'll make sure they get to their rightful owner.
With files from Lawrence Nayally
