Useful hints and tips:

I am a hopeless romantic, and a big Lord of the Rings fan. When I was a kid, I grew up with fairy tales of princesses, elves and adventures. My biggest dream then was...to be a princess.

I wanted to be a princess so bad, that when my father was asking me what I wanted for him to bring me back from a foreign trip, I would reply :

"Please bring me a golden princess dress, a silver princess dress, and ...oh, please do not forget the matching crowns too!! " 

I never got my dresses and my crowns, even though one time I put "magic wand" on my Christmas list for Santa. I figured, once I got the magic wand, it would be a simple thing to create all the pretty dresses and crowns I so craved, right? :-) I was so proud of myself for coming up with this brilliant solution.  It never worked out though. Apparently, Santa was out of magic wands - at least that was what my Mom told me. So, I just had to be satisfied to create my dreams on paper, spending endless hours drawing and sketching in my pad the beautiful visions that lived inside my head.

When I grew up, I discovered that technically, having  a magic wand was not necessary. Even though I admit, having one would make things so much easier! (Anybody know where I can get one? LOL). With the help of skill and passion and quality materials, I was finally able to bring my dream to reality by creating all the beautiful designs I had dreamed of as a kid.

My biggest satisfaction today is to be able to help anybody who has ever shared my childhood dream, to turn it into  reality.

Have you also dreamed of being a princess?

 Elnara

Ummm...who is Elnara, anyway?

Elnara is the European-born designer Adi Mileva-Thigpen. 

When I first started creating my jewelry, I had no idea who my customers were going to be. I was a member of the SCA (an international organization dedicated to researching and re-creating pre-17th-century European history) at the time, and I assumed that my designs were going to draw primarily people from the SCA.  My "medieval" name for the SCA is Elnara Niall, so naturally, I started using it to promote my designs. As the years went by, I realized that people from the SCA made only a small number of my customers, but by then everybody knew me as "Elnara", so I just kept using it and it became my artistic name.

Adi currently resides in Dayton, Ohio with her husband Gary and their  two very lively cats, Piper and Aimee.