As a small child, Nahed Eid would bounce off the walls at her father’s hardware store in Lebanon. Her hyperactivity irritated her parents and customers, so in desperation, her father gave her a pair of pliers, wire and beads to keep her occupied. The pliers did more than keep her quiet, it inspired a lifelong passion for jewellery and the arts.Ms Eid is half-Lebanese and half-Egyptian. She has lived in Bermuda for the last two years with her husband Mourad Yemmi who works for the Bermuda Monetary Authority (BMA).She will hold two exhibits of her artwork and jewellery this month.Kaleidoscopic: Mixed Media is currently on at Bermuda Society of Arts (BSoA) gallery at City Hall; another show, as yet untitled, opens at the Bermuda Arts Centre at Dockyard on July 17.“Hardware shops are still one of my favourite shops to be in,” she said. “When I move somewhere, this is the first store I locate. Back home, I often bought boxes from hardware stores that contained different things inside. They would tell me to just pay the price of the box, without opening it. They didn’t cost very much, just my weekly allowance for snacks or sandwiches. Inside, it would be like Pandora’s box with any junk that the hardware store didn’t want.”For many people buying a box, contents unseen, probably sounds like a waste of lunch money, but Ms Eid loved the experience. Even today her art is influenced by little treasures, found objects and collected items.“I have a big tool collection at home, and also a beads collection,” she said. “Even my car is collecting so many things that I have picked up from the beaches. For years, I did some recycled art that I picked up from all over. I would find something and make it into a chandelier in my house.”What gives her art and jewellery its own stamp is her emphasis on texture. For one picture, she took some of her different shaped stones for jewellery making, which she has collected from all over the world, and arranged them into a scene depicting children holding a jump rope. The stones in her jewellery often have a certain lack of uniformity that gives the eye something to puzzle over.“I graduated from art school at the Lebanese American University,” said Ms Eid. “I have taken many classes in metal smithing and wax casting. I like combining different components together. I don’t like a piece that has one uniform type of beading, or uniform colour. I like mixing up things. This is what I call eclectic. It is a little bit from all over. In one piece, I might use pearl, some turquoise, some aquamarine. I like putting different textures together. I wear the jewellery for the whole day when I make it, to see how comfortable it is and how people would feel in it.”Her habit of mixing things up is the reason for the name of her jewellery line, Melangeria, which refers to the French word melange or mixture.Before moving here she lived in the United States for two decades, and owned a shop in New York, Waxology.“It had different soaps and gift items,” said Ms Eid. “I closed it last January when my lease was up. The last two years I was more here in Bermuda. I went back to art. With my painting, I work a lot in gouache.”This is a type of paint consisting of pigment suspended in water. It is similar to water colours, but has greater reflective qualities.“For my senior study at college I did city scenes,” said Ms Eid. “I would paint laundry hanging with architecture behind it. A lot of people have said they can see some of my Bermuda scenes influenced by this. I like naive art [art with a childlike quality].”Ms Eid had her first exhibit this spring, at BSoA. It was so successful she decided to do another one.“Some of my jewellery and work was for sale in Dockyard, and people were encouraging me to have an exhibition,” she said.She said it is difficult to find beading materials in Bermuda, so she mostly uses stones bought elsewhere. However, she does like to use sea glass, shells and small beach pebbles found on the beach in Bermuda.“I love to swim, and many of the pieces get made at the beach,” she said. “Lately, I have been using so much turquoise because of the colours around me.”A website featuring her work will be online within the month, www.melangeria.com.