Japanese Beading Thread, Who Knew?

Click to see item for sale

Okay, why didn't I know about this before? I was looking for a small item to fill out an Amazon gift certificate, and thought, why not?

I got it and tried it out for the first time, and holy cow! No wonder Japanese beaders can make such amazing pieces, if they use this thread. It's downright obedient! Previously the only thing I've tried when I needed lighter thread than Wildfire or Fireline was Nymo. As anyone who has used it knows, Nymo frays, twists, knots, tangles and splits all over the place.

With the KO, I found I was beading much faster since I wasn't spending any time fighting the freakin' thread! I was able to use longer working lengths, since it doesn't fray. Between the nature of the thread and Thread Heaven, it also didn't knot or misbehave in other ways. Glorious!  I have to be careful because it maintains a much tighter tension than Nymo will, I can see it becoming too tight with a bit of encouragement.

I'm going to have to get many more colors of this stuff. I encourage anyone who hasn't tried it to check it out!! I wanted to share because I've spent way too long struggling with Nymo, and hope I can help someone else out.

We are Live!

Yesterday, I got my issue of BeadStyle magazine, with our ad on page 27. Wow. Right there where the magazine falls open because of a blow-in card. 

Today, I finalized the new webstore so that people can purchase the software with little or no problem. I was afraid the old method was too complicated.

So now it's a matter of waiting until people read the issue, have their curiosity piqued by the ad, and visit the website. Oh, and decide to buy.  Boy oh boy do I hope they decide to buy!

Advertisers link page!

People can find us in the advertisers links on the Beadstyle website as well.  And next month, the ad will appear in Bead & Button, with a much larger subscription base, so that's exciting as well.

Not too surprisingly, my creativity has been sidelined by all the stress and business of trying to get a new business launched. I sit down to bead and do a little of this and a little of that and not much of anything in particular. Not too long ago I was bubbling with ideas of what I wanted to next. I have to recover that and it may take awhile.  I hope not too long.

More Bead Organization, Storage and a Peek of Workspace

I talked before about the rolling drawers I use to organize all my non-seed beads by color. I did purchase the two additional drawer sets and now I even have a couple of spares. In addition to the by-color organization, I did some sub-categorizing.

The pic of all four sets shows them lined up as I have them when I work. They do all four slide right under the kneehole of the desk when I'm not working, or want to make the living room look neater. 

Yes, that's a cement floor. We ripped up the carpeting several years ago, and believe it or not, the concrete floor, with a big fat crack running across it and big swoops of carpet adhesive, is actually far more attractive than that carpeting was! Never have off-white carpeting in a house where people eat in the living room and walk around with their shoes on. Not a good idea.  Just say no. The previous owners installed it right before they sold. Sadists, I tell you!

When I need to pull the drawers out from under the desk, I use a long backscratcher to get hold of the farthest-in sets. Very handy. It's a reacher, it's a backscratcher. 

Sub-organization. I found out I had huge numbers of red beads, so I subdivided those into large & small, as you can see in the closeup of one of the drawer sets.  I also have separate drawers for findings, cabochons, ultrasuede, stringing materials, and finished work. Right now, that is. Finished work is growing rapidly and I'll have to find better storage than just stuffed in plastic zip-loc bags and piled in a drawer. I even have a few unlabeled drawers waiting for new items. My precious labeler has its own drawer.

Beige/tan/natural/brown and orange beads were also filed all together, but were also overpopulated, like the reds. So now Beige/Tan and Orange/Brown each have their own drawer. A drawer that's too full, piled 3 layers deep of the tiny plastic boxes you can see in the workspace picture, just impedes finding the perfect bead. 

On top of the drawer set you can see a couple of the seed-bead storage kits I use. Turns out that one of these on top of the drawer will still slide right under the desk. So that's a place for four of them, I have two more that stay on top of the desk. Oh, and I need to find a place for my growing collection of books and magazines. 

And here is a shot of my workspace, littered with beads, with my pathetic $7 magnifier from Harbor Freight and a former bedroom LED lamp. Clearly I need better visualization tools. Finding the ideal combination, though, of a comfortable position for the magnifier, the lamp, and my hands as I work in and out of the magnified area is tough. I know a lot of people use Ott Lites. I still haven't found one that suits me and I'm actually considering a professional grade magnifying lamp like those used in scientific labs. Pricey, though. 

The small colorful round dishes are the tops off of storage tins, they have a glass bottom and I've found them to be ideal holders for beads I'm working on. I have enough I can distribute many different kinds of beads and have them handy and controlled while I work. It minimizes the dropping on the floor syndrome. Not eliminates. Minimizes.   

So you can see my mess, bent needles and all. I have various bowls to hold items, and in the second desk drawer I actually keep all my tools. It's on the right hand and placed properly to reach for in the middle of something.

I do clear the desktop after every project is finished. You can see on the third drawer set from the left in the first picture a tiny peek of the current work in progress, a bead-embroidered picture frame on midnight blue ultrasuede, with silver and crystal beads. It might turn out okay, after all. 

Oddly, I hate hate hate filing papers, but I love to organize, label and tidy up my beads. I wonder why those two tasks, which seem to be similar, stimulate different centers of my brain. One is good, the other I avoid like, well, a chore. 

So there. My creative space. It's all in the living room, on the left hand side of the desk where my living room computer lives. It's a big desk. Notice along the front edge, those tiny torn post-it bits marking off measurements. If I didn't care about marring the desk, I'd just scribe those suckers into the wood. But I love the natural maple inlaid with ebony of the desk, so post-its it is. They last surprisingly long, and are amazingly handy for measuring thread, wire, and beaded lengths. 

Spring Cleaning, a Genetic Imperative? Bead Organization, Part Two

I realized during my recent cleaning/organizing effort with my beads, that this may be the last remaining symptom of the Spring Cleaning bug I inherited from my mom.

When I was a kid, turning out the closets, cupboards and storage areas in the house was an annual ritual. I think it must have been this way back in the caveman days...after a long winter sweeping out the accumulated bones, fire cinders and schmutz of months of people huddling together for warmth must have been a great relief, not to mention a hygienic necessity. 

Why this is mostly limited to women, I don't know. Do men who live alone spring clean? I sincerely doubt it. 

Just like the urge to buy school supplies in late August, spring cleaning is an urge I still get. Fortunately, I've learned to mostly quell it. I don't do heavy cleaning anymore, and whatever organizing I need to do I try to spread throughout the year. 

Yesterday, the additional two drawer units I ordered arrived. I've labeled and filled the drawers, though I still have one drawer left over. I'm sure it'll get filled pretty soon. I was able to break up three of my "color" drawers for beads...the brown/tan/orange one is now two, one for tan/beige and one for brown/orange. I split out the true blues from the blue/blue-green drawer. And now red is split by size, large & small. Those were the three fullest drawers, and now I'll be able to find things much more easily, not to mention acquire new stuff. Ahem. Eventually. Not soon.

And now I have a drawer for my ultrasuede, a separate spot for all my stringing materials and wire, and a whole drawer for cabochons. Designing will be easier, though I'll be sliding a lot more drawers during the process. 

All this is in service of getting stuff off the top of the desk, so I can spread out and work, and also keep things a bit neater. The work area is in the living room, after all. Yesterday I also got a couple more of the project cases for seed bead storage, and I'm still seeking a way to stack those while retaining an easy way to get them out of the stack. Whatever I want is always at the bottom. 

The goal is easy access, logical organization, and elimination of visual clutter. Less crap, more beading.

Still a work in progress.

The Theory and Practice of Bead Organization, Part One

My husband looks at me funny when I sit down to work with my bead software and catalog all my inventory, as I call it.  

But for me, it's an odd combination of business logic, design process and a very slight organizational wankiness.  It's a warm, feel-good process for me, combining right & left brain.  At the end of it, I know where every bead I've just purchased has gone, and helps to prevent the older purchases from getting buried or fading into the background as new ones come in.

The business logic results in my being able to trace the source and cost of every bead I purchase, whether it has been purchased wholesale or retail, and recording close to purchase date what material the items are made of, and any special facts about the item.  In the future, if I want to know what the beads labeled #244 are, I can just look them up. 

I can also check the accuracy of my receipts, and get a grasp on my total investment in beads. Right now, I suspect that other than consumables such as stringing materials, findings and perhaps seed beads, I should probably not be buying anything new for quite a while. I need to produce and sell.

The organizational quirk is that I'm not a big organizer in most areas. I avoid business and personal filing as much as I can, and still find things when I need them. My clothing is not arranged by color, nor my canned goods alphabetized.  But beads, I feel, should not remain in thousands of teeny but varied plastic bags, jumbled together.  I need to have an over-riding organizational principle, or it's all just chaos and I can't create in chaos.  I'll describe more of the physical organization of the beads in a later post.

The design process comes in as I handle the new purchases, and then integrate them with my existing inventory. I see combinations that look good together, or just see the new items in the context of my own workspace, and ideas arise. Of course, I always end up having so many ideas I'll never be able to make them all, but in the course of cataloging, the ideas arise, combine, evolve, and finally, come close to the surface enough for me to grab them, sketch them, audition partner beads and actually start the project.

So here's how the whole thing goes. I bring in the incredibly tiny packages that result from profligate spending and marvel again how buying beads and stones can pack so much value into such a small cubic space.  I try to preserve the store receipts, but frankly, often those receipts are completely useless in describing what's been purchased. Store owners just don't have the capacity to make or print receipts for specific bead purchases.

In my software, I enter each strand or bead purchase, and the software assigns an ID number. The entry has a complete description, with material, color, shape, size, place and date purchased, price and number of beads. The program calculates the price of each individual bead for me.  I'll make a list or mark each package with the computer-assigned number.

This latest trip, at Chapman's, I got a lot of different cabochons. I'm very excited about using some of these. 

Next, I take the new pieces to my workspace. I've got a Brother P-Touch label-maker to create numbered labels for each separate item.

At Harbor Freight (a great store), they sell small plastic boxes that measure about 3" x 7" x 9" that are filled with smaller plastic boxes, either 1.5" square or 1.5" x 3". These small boxes are good for strands, loose beads, cabochons of the smaller sizes, etc. I label each box with a printed number, and that's all I need to do. 

Then I file each numbered small box by color in the drawers of a set of rolling drawers, purchased from Stacks & Stacks. For me, color is the overwhelmingly important quality of a bead. I have two of these sets that roll under my desk, and I think I need two more.

I'll talk more about the color-organization later, and about my seed bead storage, which is separate from the regular beads.

The larger Harbor Freight boxes, I keep for use as project boxes. More of the small boxes fit in each drawer if I remove them from the large boxes.  For our latest trip I was able to pack enough project work into three of these boxes for the entire trip, including tools. That way I can keep materials for each project separate and not have to finish it right at the moment. I do have to be careful about not having critical materials segregated in project boxes when I need them for another project. I guess that means I have to not have too many Unfinished Projects hanging around.

So that's part one. There'll be more on the workspace, color organization, seed beads, and working tools later. With pictures. (oh boy that means I have to clean up)