Beads

I've collected beads for years.  I've always enjoyed perusing bead stores ... coming away with a pretty selection of this and that.  I turned some beads into drop earrings.  But many just stayed in my partitioned plastic boxes.  Then, bingo, one day not all that long ago, I simply got to work (it was play, actually) and strung them into necklaces.  Forget about earrings; I had far too many beads.  I found that stringing was a cinch; I simply used a nylon-coated wire from our local bead store which proved to be both strong and flexible enough to allow me to experiment with different combinations.  Then I took the finished necklaces back to the bead store where one of the pros fit on clasps.

Brief side-track:  with this past November's lower light, I bought an appealing grey heather worsted weight yarn with which to knit a pull-over sweater--something I enjoy doing when the weather starts to chill up and the evenings lengthen as the wintering sun sets in what would otherwise seem to be the middle of the afternoon.  Taking my knitting with me on my recent train trip to Santa Fe, I got the bright idea of picking out beads in one of Santa Fe's great bead stores and making a matching necklace.  Being a heathered yarn, besides the grey, there were bits of black, copper, and straw-colored yarns intermingled, so choosing colors was easy.

Here they are, sweater and necklace.

Note the little owls in the middle. 

And here are the other necklaces I made.  If you have a bead store near you, try it out.  You can use glass beads, metal, bone, clay, semi-precious stones, seed pods, shells.  For clasps, you can use one that's magnetic, one that screws together, or one that simply slips together.  Working with beads is a very tactile, satisfying pastime that produces something totally unique.

This is a magnetic clasp.  Get the two halves anywhere near each other and they immediately pop together.

The snakes and shells were hand-made from clay and given to me as a gift.  This shows what the magnetic clasp looks like when closed.

I had one bird (not two) and one small piece of amber, so I used them as a pair.  (Another magnetic clasp.)