We were lucky to catch up with Lena Bekh recently and have shared our conversation below.

Lena , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

I was born in Almaty, Kazakhstan. That time it was a Soviet Union republic. When I was a little girl I was dreaming of beautiful toys and dolls, but there were only very simple ones in the shops. My parents got me 2 craft books about stuffed toys. I was about 5 years old. And that time my creative journey has started. I asked my mom to teach me how to sew and knit. And my grandma taught me basics of crocheting.

I was making dolls and toys every single day. I made piles of them. We didn’t have beautiful craft materials in our shops, so I used old clothes and fabric scraps for my projects.

Sewing and knitting became my main hobby. I was reading magazines and books to learn new techniques and was practicing a lot.

With Internet entering our life absolutely different era has started. In a high school I was studying computer programming languages. Then I moved to Russia, Moscow to work as Mobile apps UI designer. All these knowledges helped me to adopt Information technologies to my hobby. Now I could find information, inspiration and materials all around the world.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

The birth of my daughter revived the doll making hobby from my childhood. I decided to sew several dolls for her and created account on Instagram.

Photos from my Instagram were reposted by different people and doll makers communities.
And people started to ask if I sell my dolls.

Later Anthropologie has contacted me and proposed collaboration. I had 3 collaborations with this brand. It was a very exciting experience.

The dolls I create represent my childhood dream – crafted from high quality natural cotton and linen and embellished with vintage accents – every piece is made with love and imagination. These whimsical creatures are made for little and grown up dreamers who are in love with fairy tales and magic.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

It was February 2022 when everything has changed. People killing other people is so awful. I deeply believe that all the conflicts should be solved with peaceful methods. Luckily we don’t face this war personally, but it affects our life a lot.

PayPal and Etsy have blocked accounts of all residents of Russia. I couldn’t sell my dolls abroad and buy craft materials from other countries. Postal services stopped delivering parcels to some countries. Then Instagram was blocked in our country. I was absolutely frustrated and feeling lost.

I was always open to the world. It is such a happiness to communicate with people from different countries, to learn their stories, to inspire each other, to share your skills. Thanks to Instagram I’ve met there so many great people all around the world.

I started to search for solutions to save my international creative community. Instagram works with VPN. Slowly, but it works. To sell my dolls I use Hipolink.net or Boosty.to services. They are not stable, sometimes payments don’t work. But I am very grateful that they exist and help small business like mine to stay alive.

I hope peaceful time will be back soon and instead of spreading aggression people will share their best achievements.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

What I love the most about doll making is to see that people are happy to receive my creations. There are some customers who have got the collections of my dolls. Also, a very special category of my “clients” are kids. I am absolutely happy that my both daughters’ favorite toys are the chickens sewn by me. And my kids’ friends often ask for my dolls as gifts for their birthdays. Seeing people love my work encourage me to continue to do what I love.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://lenabekh.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lenabekh
• Other: https://hipolink.net/lenabekh