How long have you been beading -- when did you start? And how'd that disease creep into *your* hapless veins?
I know this Q has been done here before, but there are new people here. So I thought it would be lovely if we all answered. It's a great way to get to know each other better.
I'll step aside for now, and let someone else answer first. Then I'll tell my story. Ready, Set ---Go!
Don't know why, don't know when (to quote an old song). It was before 1992, because there are pictures of me taken then wearing necklaces I'd made. I do remember how I first got beads, which is just as strange: a fellow fiber artist who had season tickets next to mine for Illinois basketball told me that mail order bead suppliers advertised in "Threads" (which I got because I was a knitter). For a couple of years I ordered beads on the basis of photocopied brochures with *no pictures*!
I started beading about 9 years ago. I had just been given some new earrings (captive hoops) and I didnt like the beads that were in them.... It was all over with then! (rollseyes).
The christmas of 1998 I recevied my first torch. AWWW man I was hooked! Buying glass and tools is now more fun then buying beads. :) Since then I have taken classes from some of the best. Crain Milliron, Sharon Peters, Alethia Donathan, Kim Osibin and Andrea Gurino. I havent been making to many beads these past months. It seems if it isnt one thing it is another.
Also in 2000 I started working for a bead wholesaler and made a few connections myself for importing Bali silver. I started selling on Ebay to pay for my addiction of Beads, Glass and Tools (and all the bills when DH was out fo work for 6 months a few years back) This year I made the decision to go back to school for my Accounting Certificate... I had to give up selling on Ebay :( I miss the bead buddies and the beads!
I have been to several of the large shows.... Working them and being a buyer. I have meet many of the wonderful ppl on this list (Sooz, Kandice, KDK and I am sure there are more)
I will soon be giving up my job at the bead wholesaler and moving to Phoenix, AZ in the spring. I am scared to death! :)
OK.. now that I have talked more in this post then in the last.. oh year on this newsgroup, I will shuttup! :) LOL
TTFN!
Nicole
I got into beading about 9 years ago. I saw some kits for amulets in The New Stitches magazine. So I bought two, when the arrived I had a look at them and promptly put them in the back of the cupboard. I thought them far to hard to do. Then about a year later, I saw another amulet in Classic stitches which the directions seemed to be easier. So I got out my kits and made them and I also bought the beads and made the one out of Classic stitches. Then I made more of them. The ladies at my Monday night class wanted to do them. So I ended up ordering more beads and showing the ladies how to do it. It was very difficult to get beads etc. at that time in UK only a handful of places and all mail order. I joined this NG for a while but at that time it was not very friendly. Only about 5 posts a day. I was seen off buy sending money to USA and not getting the beads despite many emails. I asked that she send them to my email friend who would forward them. Never did get them and I hope the cash stolen from me haunts that person.
Then I did a one day course on beaded tassels and that set me off on the path of where I am today, well and truly obsessed with beads and what I can make with them. My grateful thanks to my friends on RCB for sending me beads so I can follow my obsession and thanks to Sooz for stepping in this NG and bringing it alive. Love and peace to all Shirley
In message , Dr. Sooz writes
In 1986 I was in my final year of art school (majoring in jewelry) and one of my fellow students told us about a lady who sold beads from her garage. Her clientele were mainly stage mothers making dance costumes. My friend proposed we all go to see The Dance Lady (as we called her) and buy some beads. When we got there it was incredible - shelves and shelves of beads, wall to wall, floor to rafters. She sold them by the scoop. We bought as many as we could afford on a student budget. I got some screw together plastic canisters (a huge extravagance for me at the time!) and set them on my jeweler's bench where I admired but did little else with them. My friend figured out how to knit with them. That was about it. No one in the jewelry department at Curtin Uni had the slightest idea how to bead weave or anything else for that matter. So I would pick them up, gaze adoringly at them (they shimmered so) until eventually with all the moving around I did, I lost them.
About 6 years ago I was robbed and I vowed I would replace the lost, precious items of jewelry with distinctive pieces that I would make. At the time my husband set me up on the internet for the first time and found rcb for me. I met people who were more than enthusiastic about this medium and I found myself become infected with a madness only beaders truly understand.
I have replaced what I lost many times over and gained much more than than jewelry. Marisa
I blame it all on you people!
I went from stained glass to lampworking in about 1997 (I think) and then I started hanging around here!
Alright class, settle down. This is Ancient Beading History 101.
I got my start in 1974 (yes, that's a 7 in there). Liquid silver and carved stone animal fetish beads were all the rage. I'd just come back from a family vacation in AZ, where I found a magical bead store in Sedona (which is still there!). I really didn't have a plan or designs in my head, I just bought pretty beads. The owner showed me how to string a simple necklace and I took off. (Oh, I was a freshman in high school.)
Luckily, within a few months a bead store opened locally, conveniently located as part of a larger needlework shop I'd been feeding my other addiction at for a few years (my grandma taught me to embroider when I was 7). So I could buy fabric, yarn and beads and get all sorts of wild ideas. I embroidered a pair of jeans with sequins, liquid silver and facetted amethysts one Christmas, made tons of jewelry, jumped into the beadle-point craze (needlepoint stitches with seed beads caught in each stitch), and generally had fun and made my parents grateful I wasn't some crazed hippie kid (not much, anyway).
I made jewelry through college in the early 80's, but it was overtaken by my new love for handweaving and spinning. When my niece turned 15 (she's 10 years younger than me) I gave her the last of my bead stash and told her to have fun...and history repeated itself. LOL When she went off to college in San Diego, she discovered several bead stores, and came back one Christmas to promptly turn me on to polymer clay. I dabbled for a year or two and then, 9 years ago, took my first lampwork class. Woohoo! I've been making beads and some jewelry, ever since.
KarenS
I'm in there with Karen - I started beading back in the early 1970's (73 or 74?). My mom was into Macrame and took me to the crafts store with her. I got to play with beads, she got her macrame stuff and I was hooked. I've done stringing ever since, added seed bead work about 10 years ago, and since then added polymer clay, wirework/maille, and PMC.
Barbara Beader and Polymer Clay Junky
I started beading in 2000 I believe. I was taught how to make hemp necklaces in my senior year of high school and picked it up after I graduated. There was a bead store down the street from where I lived and I would go in there and paw through their beads looking for large hole beads. After spending an arm and a leg, my bf at the time, told me about polymer clay and that I could probably make my own. So I did. ;-)
After a while I stopped doing hemp necklaces and moved onto learning how to off loom bead weave, although I continued to play with clay. One of my first pieces was a netted necklace with polymer clay drops (it was hideous!). I think I still have it bagged up, never to be seen again. ;-)
I really got into clay and making beads at first and didn't do much actual beading for some time. It was probably about a year until I really got into beading and by then I had found RCB (although I lurked for some time). My stash grew and grew and so did my beading level.
These days I don't bead as much as I'd like to but I off loom weave, string, bead embroider, work in polyclay and have recently gotten into lampworking when the time and weather allows it. ;-)
First -- I LOVE all these posts, they're so interesting! Thank you, everyone, for indulging my question. I know even the people I've known for years better now.
I started beading in 1966. (I know, SHE'S SO OLD! AAAAAAAA!!) I made love beads for a local store -- I was 12. (Yeah -- I did end up being a hippie.) My sister and I came upon a stash of old, old beads from my great-grandmother (I still have some of the best ones), and some from a hobby store, and we were off! Entrepreneurs.
Both of us still bead. I did other things in between, and abandoned beading for years here and there. When I closed my rubber stamp business in 1997, I took some of my profits and blew them the very next day at a fabulous bead store in Seattle (I was there for a stamp show). What a day! What wallowing and treasure and self indulgence!
I consider myself a beadweaver, PMCer, and collage artist at this stage in my life, and a connoisseur of lampwork beads. I do some wirework too, because how else ya gonna get earrings? I don't string much at all if I can help it (shrug~ it just doesn't interest me). I like embellished-to-the-nines beadweaving to *do*. (I'll *wear* strung pieces happily!) I usually have projects set up all over the house, in various states of half-made mess. I find it very inspiring to have the house all messed up with projects.
I have a few webpages on Kandice's website (thank you, dolling!!) that give info on beads -- The Links List. It's categorized and alphabetized, and has a table of contents. Go use it!
Love, Sooz
I have a little box of beads from Woolworths when I was 10, bright wooden beads strung on tennis gut from the 70's, my mother's button jar and many, many paperweights. Used to have a marble collection as well until my "friend" organised a competition and cleaned me out.I was 12.
In other words I like bright shiny things. The real bead addiction kicked in when I went to London and found a bead shop. Wow!! New Zealand did not have many bead shops then. We do now but they are expensive and at least a good drive away.
I had gone shopping for a friend in London but bought lots of goodies. Then I discovered French beaded flowers. I now own many beaded flower books, subscribe to Bead and Button, Beadwork and Bead Unique.
I managed a trip to Milwaukee this year and had a wonderful time going to lessons, buying beads and talking to other beaders.
I still work full time but my head buzzes with ideas and I sell through three galleries. I also grow lavenders for oil and dried rubbings as well as coach Badminton.
I have a few more years teaching to go plus lots to do in spare time.
This group is great and I always remember Sooz being so encouraging when I first posted.
Cheers, Jan
I started in 1985 or so, I was down to my last $50.00 and my unemployment had run out. I guess I just got tired of trying to get somebody else to give me a job so I spent the dough on beads and thin macrame chord, sold all I did with them for double and so on until I had a real business. It took patience on the part of my family to get through that first bit though! People were mostly nice and supportive with helping me find places to sell my work too. I have only had to work for an employer for two years since then, been self employed with beads or computer graphic art all these years.
It was my mom who helped me figure out bead weaving a few years later, I remember looking at the directions and my eyes just crossed! My mom was quilting at the time mostly but she decided to try the brick stitch directions, then taught me. She made a beaded curtain when I was a kid in the 70s and I went shopping for the beads with her, that was fun and I remeber those beads well today! Maybe that was the real start of it all?
Ingrid
I started beading in 1990. My hobby at that time was photography. I had been working as a floral designer when I came down with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (none of the doctors knew what it was) and was on disability for awhile because I couldn't walk. I decided I needed something artistic to do that I could work on when I felt well and not work on when I had to stay in bed. About this time I got an invitation to do an art fair with my photography. I did several art fairs, beads were just starting to appear in my area, there was one bead store near us. I bought some beads to make earrings while I was in my booth waiting for people to buy my photography. People started to buy my earrings instead and I took the money I made from that and started a jewelry design business. I started attending bead society meetings and made several good friends who are also beaders. I've gone to many large bead shows - Bead & Button and the Gathering (International Society of Glass Beadmakers) with my bead sisters. In 1995 I saw dichroic glass for the first time and went out to the Embellishment show (old name for Bead and Button) in Portland, OR to take a class with Donna Milliron. I saved up and bought a kiln and added fused dichroic glass to my repetoire. I tend to do intricate strung designs (I hate the term "simple stringing") using semiprecious beads and dichroic glass. I prefer to make my own patterns rather than bead weaving. I do art/craft shows. I work part time at our local library and teach beading at some of the nine libraries we have in our system. Since I live close to NYC, I am able to shop in the bead districts in the city, which is great fun. Patti
I always had beads when I was a kid. I remember going to Ben Franklin Crafts with my mother and buying little bags of those plastic "blackberry" beads, star beads, and pony beads. I'd make myself necklaces and bracelets.
When I was a teenager, I made necklaces for my sister's friends. I'd braid very fine braids out of strands of jute, sew them into circles, and embellish the circles with seed beads.
I got into beadweaving when I was about 20, I think. My mother had bought me a copy of Bead and Button, and I'd bought myself a book on beading techniques from the discount table at waldenbooks. while looking at an amulet bag, I thought "I wish I could make something like that", and then stopped and said "wait, why COULDN'T I make that?"
so I learned beadweaving, and it quickly developed into an obession. Before I started beadweaving I'd always been crocheting or sewing or knitting something, and I think that helped..I already had the patience that it required, as well as the ability to be comfortable with a needle and thread.
-Amber.
hehe I love you Sooz!!! :)
I had to sit and think about this one! Back in the early 80's I was young and dumb and living in Austin Texas with a jeweler (he was a master jeweler but cocaine was sidetracking both of us). Anyway... I was around the shop a lot and learned about lost wax casting and wax carving/molding/modeling, primarily in silver. A friend of ours at the shop gave me a bag of small fw pearls and showed me how to properly string them so that I could pick up repair work when it came in. I still have the double strand bracelet I made from them.
Not long after that I started making some long, busy earrings (very
80's!) and selling to friends. I changed course for awhile and started making beautiful half and full masks with leather, suede, beads, feathers and sterling charms. My ex SIL still has one I made for her that covered most of her head in pink feathers and beads! She wanted to be a pink flamingo for halloween... so she colored her hair pink, wore a pink teddy, a pink boa, pink fishnet stockings and pink stilletos. LOl What can I say... it was the 80's!!!Drug recovery got me out of Austin Texas a couple of years later and though I still worked on different things (restoring old furniture and reusing found objects mostly) I didn't 'find' beads again until I moved to Tahoe in 1997 and discovered a wonderful little bead store and *that* was all she wrote!!! It was like riding a bicycle... and finding an old friend!
Oddly enough I have never lost my desire, yearning, what ever you wanna call it, to work with silver. To take silver and cast, hammer, twist, file, saw... to create beautiful things. I was in awe of it then and still am!
I started out as a cloth doll artist, and then, around '97, I started adding beaded embellishments to my dolls. That got me "hooked" on beads, but I didn't know what I could do with them.....then I bought a beading magazine at a bead store, and the whole world of beads opened up!
[My website details some of this:I also found RCB (I have no idea when), and that has kept me knee deep in beads, for sure!!! :-)
But then that Evil One (Sooz, you know who you are ) told me about "altered books", and I went running off in that direction! LOL! So now I do a bit of everything: fabric art, collage, beads, and wire. I have to call myself a "Mixed Media Artist" now! Although fabric is my first love in art (and my fall-back medium), I love experimenting with just about everything!
RCB still rocks, and always keeps my imagination stirred up! Love you guys!!!!!!!!!
My mom and grandmom had always been into sewing and crafts, and I was taught to sew, to crochet, to glue, to cut - it all "took" but knitting I was never able to do. I also loved to do art, and initially went to college to get a degree in commercial art. I made all A's & B's in my classes, but the department chair told me I had no talent AND I BELIEVED HIM. So I changed majors, and went back into crafts, such as cross stitch, embroidery and needlepoint. Later I started taking art classes at the local library with a great teacher (although she really liked my little kids stuff the best LOL - I took them to class with me.) One of the crafts my mom did was those long crocheted necklaces with metallic thread and plastic beads, but I never could get the hang of it. My daughter started her own little bead business when she was about 12 making necklaces and bracelets and selling them to her friends. I made her a spreadsheet to keep up with her earnings - but the bead bug hadn't bit me yet.
When I married my DH, he already had a side business making wooden jewelry - and we shared an interest in gems and shiney things - but he could actually MAKE them - so we began a partnership, I'd string 'em, and he'd do all the findings work. He also made poly clay beads that I would incorporate in bead kits and jewelry. This started about 1997. We bought so much stuff at bead and gem shows that it became obvious we'd never be able to utilize it all - so we started selling our excess inventory plus jewelry we'd make.
I wasn't sure I could continue without him, but I just have too many beads not to! LOL And of course the friends I've made here have become essential to my recovery and well-being.
Hugs, Karleen Member International Jewelry Designers Guild (IJDG) Vibrant Jewels:
That lavender oil is really something! I still have half the bottle you sent me... I use it all the time, it's a lifesaver when it comes to burns, and it works *miracles* when it comes to headaches and stress.
I have a "seminal bead" story, which in a symbolic way marks the beginning of my bead obsession. Other than this, there's no demarcation for the entry of beads into my life, because my mom and my sisters always had beads and bead looms around the house.
There was this moment, though, when I was maybe six or seven, and a cobalt-blue, perfectly round ceramic bead about 1/2" in diameter strayed into my life. It was on the slag heap behind the ceramics studio at the Oregon School of Arts and Crafts, where both my mom and my teenage sister were taking classes. I remember it as rolling from the pile and stopping in front of my feet; whether that really happened or it is the embellishment of a child's magical fancy, I don't know. I do know that the bead was instantly perceived by me as an amulet, a thing with a VOICE. I picked it up and put it in my pocket... later I remember asking if I could keep it. I was told that I could keep anything from the slag heap.
That bead lived with me, in my pockets, for years. I have no idea whatever became of it, because it's long gone, but the memory of it shapes how I handle all beads... not as ingredients to a finished piece, but as individual stories. From then on, grown-ups knew I loved beads... they would take me to bead stores, or bring me a single lovely bead as a gift. It was many years before I would ever make a piece of jewelry, and the first ones were exceedingly simple, rudimentary bits strung on sewing thread... I've become a lot more sophisticated in my stringing techniques, but even now the strongest allure beads have for me is as individuals.
C'mere little pretty, tell me your story...
I was in Camp fire girls and had to make a headband on a loom for my indian uniform. I remember it was so hard trying to get them beads inbetween those darn strings.... But I remember I loved the fact that I was able to do it and it looked really great to an 11 year old.
Well, about a year ago I happened upon a bead store... All those colors! I found a loom and decided to make my husband a hatband. I bought it and went home and have been happily beading ever since. I actually showed a friend how to use the loom and the next time I saw her she showed me a hummingbird she had made out of beads! The student had surpassed the teacher. She showed me how to do that and I have done one since then. Then she got into Amulet bags and now I am doing those as well. I just love working with all the colors and the Peyote stitch. I am the worlds most unpatient person but somehow I love beading. Who would of thunk it! ..........Windy
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