Meet the Northern Mudlarks
For Gail and her daughter, the path to metal smithing didn’t begin in a workshop – it began on the windswept shores of Seaham, where they first discovered the glistening allure of sea glass back in 2014. What started as a shared love of treasure hunting quickly became something more: a creative journey rooted in their deep connection to nature, history, and each other. From knotting leather cords around sea-worn gems to casting intricate metal pendants inspired by the land and lore of northern England, this self-taught pair have crafted a life full of exploration, artistry, and storytelling.
Now known to thousands of fans as the Northern Mudlarks, Gail and her daughter document their adventures across beaches, rivers, fields, and bottle dumps on YouTube, bringing viewers along for the ride as they unearth fragments of the past and transform them into future heirlooms. In this interview, they share their story—how a lifelong love of collecting led to a passion for jewellery making, what it’s like working together as a mother-daughter team, and why a simple dice remains high on their bucket list of dream finds.
Could you tell us about yourselves and how you got into metal smithing?
It all started back In 2014 when we discovered Seaham sea glass online, we went to the beach and quickly became absolute obsessed with these beautiful, multicoloured frosty glass gems! ’Treasure hunting’ is something we’ve both done since we can remember, one of my mum Gail’s first memories is picking pottery out of a field behind her house, and I was raised the same way, always looking at the ground and collecting little treasures. As we were visiting Seaham beach so regularly, we started to build quite a collection of sea glass. Wondering what we could do with the glass we decided to make jewellery with it. We are also both very creative people, and have been all our lives (as you can probably tell I’ve taken after my mum a lot!) We’re always making or building something or other. So making jewellery from our sea glass finds seemed like the natural progression of our hobby.
We started by making sea glass and leather jewellery, learning how to make leather cordage and how to tie different kinds of knots, it evolved into us incorporating more of the treasures we find, like pottery, metal artefacts, found gemstones/ crystals and wood. We also started using gemstones, pearls and beads etc. Eventually we started manipulating metals, like coper and silver to make our own basic findings and pendants, and as soon as we’d discovered metal smithing, the rest was history! Thanks to YouTube tutorials and books are now both self taught metal smiths and jewellery designers.
How do you find working together as a mother and daughter?
We work together very well! We share many of the same interests and we enjoy each other’s company. We’re very lucky to have such a great relationship where we can learn together, share ideas, collaborate and of course go on adventures. We craft and create together on different projects and can work to each other’s strengths too, which is great. Every new piece of jewellery I make I take straight to her for her opinion and vice versa.
You create your own designs. Where does your inspiration come from?
Our inspirations come from the same places, although our personal styles and methods of creating are often quite different. The things we find inspire us, the natural beauty of objects like fossils, seeds, leaves, buds, shells etc but also the history and folklore behind our native flora and fauna as well. History plays a huge role in both our work, not only the history of the artefacts we discover, but local history, social history and even our own family history. Mum especially has made many historic reproduction pieces and I also take inspirations from historic jewels and stone carvings, especially from the north of England and Scotland where we’re from.
Your YouTube is amazing with over 100,000 subscribers! How did you decide to start making videos?
Thank you so much! Similar to the story of how we became metal smiths, we started looking for videos of beach combing on YouTube, at the time there wasn’t any, but through YouTube we discovers a small community of people in London who called themselves Mudlarks, which is what we were without realising it! So, we started making YouTube videos about our adventures in beach combing, mudlarking, crystal/ gem hunting, metal detecting, field walking, bottle dump larking and so on. Because we are from Northumberland, we wanted to show that mudlarking was possible not just in London, but across the UK, which is also why we called ourselves the Northern Mudlarks. At first it was overwhelming to see how many people from all over the world were watching and commenting, but over the years we’ve built a wonderful supportive community around our channel.
Which piece has been your biggest challenge to date, and why?
This is a difficult question to answer. There’s been so many times I’ve just wanted to throw a piece off a bridge, haha! Metal smithing has been quite a journey, certain techniques have taken much longer to learn than others. Earlier this year I made and filmed the process of making a large sliver pendant of a hand holding a marble, a Codd marble in fact which is the stopper from inside the neck of a unique kind of bottle. I carved the hand out of wax and cast it which was a challenge. The technique I use for casting, called sand casting, it’s more limited compared to lost wax casting. Working around obstacles like that is why I enjoy what I do so much, the feeling of pride when I successfully make into reality what only existed in my mind is an amazing feeling!
What would you love to find most on your next exploration of the countryside?
We are really hoping to do some more crystal hunting or maybe some gem hunting this summer, we love looking for agates so a bike ride into the Northumbrian countryside would be wonderful! We have a bucket list of things we want to find, oddly a dice is something we’ve wanted to find for so long now! It doesn’t seem like much, but we watch our mudlarking friends find them all the time and for some reason they still elude us!
Tell us about your workspace, and what you would wish to add to it if you could?
Right now we don’t have a workshop, haha! We are in the process of renovating our house and creating a new studio. So right now we are working out of my future bedroom which isn’t ideal. The plan is to make our own custom space for all our needs. It’s a dream of mine to have my own lost wax casting set up someday too!
What does a typical week look like for you, and which aspect is your favourite?
At lest once a week we set out on one of our treasure hunting adventures, which is weather dependant so we have to be quite flexible. I then spend a few days editing while mum cleans the finds and researches any historic finds we’re unfamiliar with so we can share the history in the ‘round-up’. This year mum and I made a vegetable garden, which we’ve filmed for our other channel, so we spend a few days of the week in the garden which is so lovely at this time of year!
I have been busy making some jewellery in the afternoons and evenings and during the nice weather I like to spend some time during the day casting jewellery outside which feels like such a treat!
What are your plans for the future? Is there a piece you would love to make?
We have soo many ideas and plans! We would both love to dedicate more of our time to film our creative processes for YouTube and just spend more time making in general really! We’ve been talking about making jewellery or other crafts on location, so finding something and making in into jewellery while there on the beach or casting an artefact we find by the river, there by the river. I think the would be really cool! Mum wants to make some more art dolls, she actually filmed a video of her making an articulated doll from driftwood recently which our viewers loved. We are never short of ideas on what to make, It’s just a matter of finding the time to turn them into reality.
Northern Mudlarks, as you know now, are an incredibly interesting and very talented duo which leads them to be hugely popular with their products selling out within days of launch (and many pieces gone within hours!). If you’d like to find out when their next product launch is make sure to Favourite their shop on Folksy. Here’s how:
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