STEPHIE'S BEADS AND BAUBLES

I love seed beads and have been collecting and beading with them for almost 25 years now. I have a customer I am working with and we needed purple seed beads for a part of the project and when I looked I realized I needed to start adding to my seed bead collection. When I started all I could get were seed beads in the craft stores and if we wanted to take a bit of a drive there was a lovely store that sold American  Indian items along with the craft supplies to make American Indian projects and I could get tubes and hanks there but with four small kids money was tight and I got what I could. Now a days, there are so many more colors then I could have even imagined  back then so I had fun picking out now only for my customer but for me. Lets be real here, I need maybe 50 seed beads or so for my project so even the tubes I bought to use for my customer will be hardly touched, so they all go into my collection.

This is what we are attempting to do. She has a c ute little basket with a wooden knob on top. She wants some pretty dangles, like wine charms, to hang off of this loop, on the ends which I will roll into hoops to hang two dangles each which will go to the edge of the basket, basicly lying on top of the basket. Our challenge was to find beads small enough to still be able to use the basked easily as it will store regularly used items. Big beads made it difficult to pick up the lid, as it is a tiny knob, I used a wine charm loop for this hoop so you can see it is pretty small. On top of the two dangles we are going to position this lovely glass charm and I needed to find slightly larger beads to put on either side to hold it in place. Right now it is able to slide over the seed beads.

this next bracelet was the first one I made and sent to  her to see what she thought, I had the size of the basket all wrong !! This is a single m memory bracelet so normal size , she sent the lid to me to see how tiny it as, lol, I was way off !! the tape on it shows how big it needed to be, but the beads were just too big to make using it on a daily basis convienent . So, we will not be using the memory bracelet, but a large wine charm hoop, or cutting down a memory wire so it fits around the knob and just slightly over laps and then I can hang two dangles per end loop !!

So, I went to Lima Beads, my favorate seed bead supplier. They have an amazing selection and good prices and above all , amazing customer service and extremely fast shipping !!

If you love beads, you will love them !! I get nothing for promoting them, but I promote what I love,  www.limabeads.com.

I got my goodies in today and I just ordered them thursday or  friday. I am thrilled. Fast shipping !!

Here are the purples I pulled out for my customer to choose from but ignore the pink one on top, the lighting was not good when I set them out, but once all the window blinds were up and I took a picture, I realized it belonged in my pile , although all of these are in my pile, I will use very few of these seed beads in the project,  lol , so they are all for my collection but I am putting these aside until we finish  using them for her project !!

All the seed beads are 11/0 and I picked up a couple of 6/0 as well as three  cube beads in a 4 mm below, for my collection. All the seed beads are TOHO and  just stunning quality. They ranged from 1.20 to 2.50 depending on the finish of the bead. They are all just gorgeous.

here are the colors just for me, so pretty !! I am soooo excited !!!

I had bought some pretty African paper beads for my customer to use in her project and I was so impressed with them I bought more for myself !! I LOVE them , the colors are so rich and pretty !!!

The paper beads were pretty reasonable to me, 10 cents each for two  sets of 12, so 1.20 for the dozen each set,  30 cents each for the other set of 12 and 60 cents each for the two large ones. They are just stuning in person. They had other colors too, but I liked these the best. They have such a pretty glossy look to them !!

So, when I get the basket project going I will be taking pictures to send to the customer as we design. I have her premission and  will share what we are doing and the final , finished project here and will share the names and sites of the artists that have created some stunning pieces for her to use in our projects as this is the first of quite a few beautiful pieces we will be designing and I will be making for her bedroom and bathroom !!

Thanks for stopping by !! I am so grateful for my readers !!!

Stephie