Beadzeimers

How many times have you come across this in your bead room?

And scratched your head and gone, what was I going to use these for?  It’s fun picking color palettes and bead shapes. I enjoy the Zen of selecting, the oooohhh when you find le bead juste and then… Beadzeimer’s sets in. Other projects are more demanding; if you stack one more bag of beads on your work table it will collapse; you laid out FIVE different palettes for this project and begin to suffer from choice fatigue. Weeks go by, and one day you encounter this great grouping of beads and can’t for the life remember why they came to be there.

And you put them back. Sigh. But picking palettes is very soothing, and good practice. Yes, that’s what I tell myself.

Well, I can’t leave it at that – so here’s a palette I enjoyed picking: 

This loomed wallhanging was inspired by a photograph of an iris, and I was pleased at how the ombre effect came out.

Blame it on Barb

Barb is my roommate from grad school. She became a doctor, I became a professor.  We mostly lived in a one-bedroom apartment - I had the living room, she had the bedroom. That was back when we were young and penniless, living on stipends and student loans. We had the requisite grad-school furniture: cheap chests of drawers, a dinette set, and a cinderblock book case, though not the cable spool table. We had some standards.

Barb and I have had some fun travels over the years (decades). One of the most memorable was the time she took a temporary stint at a practice in Juneau, Alaska for six months in the summer of 1988.  She invited me to join her (and her four little dogs) on the trip out, and we drove her Toyota Celica from southside Virginia to Seattle, where she had booked us on the ferry up the Inside Passage to Juneau.

One of the things Barb did while in Juneau was take some beading classes and she sent me a pair of brick stitch fringed earrings and a loomed bookmark.  I could not stop handling them. I still have the bookmark and you can see it has gotten frayed.  I am the cause of that fraying, not the passing years.

                            I just noticed a flaw in my photo - can you see it?

 I was so taken with this beadwork that I began looking for books on fringed earrings. Then someone gave me one of those little Native American bead looms and that got me started on what became a passion for loomed beadwork. Now Barb owns some of my beaded jewelry, as does her daughter, Allie. It's lovely to see my beads on friends.

But every time we get together I tell her she's the reason I'm now a pauper. A happy, happy pauper.

Thanks, Barb.