Egregious Use of "Quotes"

Saturday we went to the Pasadena Bead Show. This year I spent a lot less, and lot more selectively than I have on previous trips. Perhaps that's because my budget is limited. Perhaps it's because the one vendor I wanted to really visit, Out of Our Mines, wasn't attending the show this time.

Pity. I really wanted a shot at their wonderful cabochons. Although they have lots of items up on their website, there's just no substitute for fondling the stones in person.

Anyway, I had a good time, frugally speaking, and found some lovely old undyed coral branches, only $20 a strand!!  And also some wonderful raku porcelain beads and donuts by Amy Mealy of Xaz Beads.  These beads are gorgeous up close. The play of color is incredible, and the beads are light, since they're made of porcelain.  The price is also great.

I found some lovely coral rounds and turquoise teeny almost heishi strands for reasonable prices as well.  I picked up some ear wires, as I've been plunging into earrings lately. No silver, other than a pair of silver spiral earrings that I'll probably just keep for myself, since silver prices are going through the roof.

At a booth called Mineral Treasures, we found some Russian rockhounds who just love their rocks. They know every mineral intimately and are glad to share the details. In depth. They kindly dismantled a necklace when all I wanted to buy was the wire-wrapped dendritic quartz pendant. The rock is similar to the one pictured here.  They have kick-butt labradorite, too.  Great prices, as well.

And then there was the one, truly evil, item. Dichroic coated seed beads. Yipes! I won't say what I spent for them, but they come in tiny 1 gram vials just like crack cocaine. They're about as expensive, and just as addicting. I found the website for Dichro Beads, who makes them. Turns out the coating company she uses is right down the road in Orange, CA. Hmm. Wonder if I could get them to coat things for me? $8 per gram is steep. On the site, it says "use sparingly" but I guess that's just because using them in masses would break the bank, hey?  You need as little as 6 grams to spice up a necklace, they say...well, using my old-school math, that comes out to $48 just for accent beads. Yipes again!

Since dichroic material is so hard to photograph well, I suspect the sample pieces you see on the site are spectacular in person. The worked beaded beads I saw at Paula Radke's booth, where I purchased them, were quite lovely. I only bought two vials, and I'll report back on how using them turns out. A single gram has between 180 and 200 beads, so I will indeed have to use them sparingly.

What's this about quotes, you say? On our way home we saw this sign.  I sat there staring at it, still kind of stunned from the sensory overload of the bead show.  Then, slowly, something penetrated.  I scrambled for the camera before the red light changed.

"7"???  What did they mean, "7"?  Were they not open seven days a week? Did they think there were other days?  Did they want to emphasize the number 7 even more than just making it bigger and bolder than the rest of the text in the line? Did they not understand the use of quotes?

I'm still confused.  But I'm guessing so is the sign-writer.

Thank You, Kate Tracton

I was looking at some netted ropes and thought I'd try, as you do, to find some instructions on the web. Just try! You can find free tutorials for every kind of spiral out there, all sorts of netting and crocheted things and what have you. Netted rope? Zilch. A few sorta patterns for money, but nothing precisely like I wanted.

Then, on the Etsy Beadweavers email list, this, from Kate Tracton:

"String four pearls alternated with four size 11 seed beads. Tie into a circle. Step up through a seed bead and do a net around each pearl using size 15's and an 11 in the center. Go around all the pearls and step up to the center 11 in the next net. Add a pearl, and come out the next center 11. As you progress, you pull the loops up around the pearls.  Continue those two rows for as long as you need.

"Lather, rinse, repeat" :D"

So, I sat down with thread, needle, some pearl substitutes, and the aforementioned 15 and 11 seed beads. The colors were awful, but this is a test sample, not a finished piece.  And behold, it was easy!  For something that looks so complex, amazingly easy.

So thanks, Kate, for so generously sharing a technique. I can see that to make it more flexible, I need more beads in the netting. The way it is, it's great for making netted beads, as pulling the thread tight makes it very stiff. Varying the sizes of the "pearls" would make an oval bead.  Quite a bit can be done with it, I think, and I'm looking forward to exploring. So thank you, Kate.

Your generosity is much appreciated.

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. 

The Theory and Practice of Bead Organization, Part Three: Seed Beads

There are so many seed bead kinds, colors, sizes, and shapes, that trying to organize them requires a whole separate system of containers and organizers.

In the software, BeadEnCounter, that I'm working on, seed beads are tracked separately from other kinds of beads and findings. They have their own section in the database, and I can print out a current inventory any time I want to. This is invaluable when I want to purchase new beads, because when I'm confronted with a whole rack of beads in a store, I find myself drawn, over and over to the same range of colors. After I purchased my third batch of 505 blue plum in 11/0, I said "this is enough!" and started keeping the list in my purse.  It's right next to the long list of medications I take, and just about as important!

Of course, not all stores, local or online, adhere to the same numbering system as Toho does. If they use their own numbering, you'll have to rely on color descriptions, which can also vary. Delicas have their own system. But at least I know if I've bought too many tangerines, or if I happen to need a tangerine in size 15. Having a list, as well as organizing your beads, can let you know where your palette is thin. For instance, since I divide my drawers of regular beads by colors, I know that I've got red beads out the wazoo, and very few actual clear beads. Yellow and white are also under-represented.

In designing the software, I found I needed several important criteria to distinguish among my seed beads. Size is first. Then comes shape, then code/color.  Cost is not as important as it is with regular beads, as it's impossible to count all the seed beads in a piece. I can guesstimate (a word which interestingly, my spell-checker does not flag) that I've used a certain number of grams, or half of the container I bought, but I can get close enough for costing that way. I generally only worry about seed-bead costs with the heavy metal type beads, which can run close to a dollar a gram. 

Every store, it seems, packages their seed beads differently. This makes comparison shopping difficult, unless you're able to break the prices down per gram. However, I've found that if you get on the email list and watch the sales, the most economical way to buy seed beads is from Artbeads.  At times they have dollar sales where 8gms of beads will be discounted 75%, depending on the original cost. Or they'll have 50% off sales. If anyone has a better source, let me know.

Artbeads uses small plastic bags for their beads, 8gms each. Other stores around here use round tubes, with 30 gms in them. Or triangular tubes. Or short round tubes with 15 gms. Or different tubes for different sizes of beads.

In any case, it's impossible to logically organize anything when everything is in different containers. Drives me nuts. So I standardized on these plastic containers with a flip-top like a Tic-Tac box.  Dee's Place has them in at the best price I've found anywhere, locally or online. She ships quickly too, I've ordered several times, trouble-free. I get the smaller ones for small amounts of beads. The 3.75" ones will hold 28-30 gms of beads easily. 

And then I lay them down in these "project cases" from Stacks & Stacks. Right now, they're divided by size, though my size 11's are just about to outgrow their case, when they all come home from the project boxes they're currently in.

Inside the box, I'm not terribly fussy about how the colors sequence. I figure if they get messed up, I'll just see some new combinations that might spark an idea. What I do not want is two layers of containers. That's why I chose the shallow document case. I can fit about 55-60 containers in one case. One layer means I can see them all without shifting anything about.

Notice the labels? First each item is entered into the software, with a code if it has it, by size & color if not. Each flip-top is labeled with the P-touch as I transfer the beads into it. If there are special facts, such as one being a heavy metal or extra-costly, I note that on the label too. I found that one bead mixture was costing about $27 per 30 gm tube. But by combining two other $3.95 colors, I got my own custom mixture that is essentially identical. At least I can't tell them apart. 

I'm still working on way to stack these boxes so each of them is accessible without having to pull one off the bottom all the time. 

Soon, I'll include a picture of my working area, with all the storage in place.