Beads! beads! beads! everywhere I look there are beads! Sundance Beads, Miyuki Beads, Toho Beads and Aiko Beads. Wait I am not finished yet! Japanese and Czech seed beads, Charlottes, bugles, delicas, hex, triangles, tila beads, berry beads, super duo, twin beads (the last 2 are my latest addition) and so many more. They can come in sizes 11, 14, 15, 8 and 6.

Beads come silver lined, crystal lined, sparkling, translucent, galvanized, aurora borealis (ab), opaque, gold lined in all shades and colors such as garnet, root beer, galvanized gold, crystal lined silver, Ceylon… and this is just the beginning. Change the color of your  translucent bead and thread as it can be like a chameleon when you play with the thread colors.

I really don’t know when my love of beading on my needlepoint started. I don’t know exactly what sparked it, what got me going. I remember dabbling in it years ago and wondering why bother? and now…how things change.

I pretty much stitch every day, not all day long but anywhere from about 3-6 hours and on Sundays it can be a marathon day. It is hard for me remember the last piece of needlepoint that I did that has no beading. What? no beads? I don’t think so!

I had been stitching along the last week on a few different pieces without needing to do any beading! I was having bead withdrawals…I needed to bead. Am I crazy or what? To me it is very relaxing, very soothing and settles me in. So Wednesday night I took Bastet out and re-beaded her amulet. I wasn’t pleased with my choice of the gold beads. On top of that I didn’t like the way they were laid in…just not sitting purr~fectly straight. I am so much happier with it now. There isn’t too much more beading left on her after that. I am already thinking ahead to my beading ahead of me.

A dear friend of mine asked me a few weeks ago to shop for orange Delica Beads that she needed for a project that she is working on. A Halloween witch by Melissa Shirley. As always she says no hurry, whenever…but I knew that I wasn’t headed to my favorite bead store for a 2-3 weeks, so I pulled out 1 of my bead containers. If she is like me and she is thinking about that piece, she wants to bead it NOW, not next week, not next month So I selected an array of orange beads and sent them to her and said select what you like and then return the rest when I see you next. I had to laugh when I got a text from her saying “your package arrived” and “did you send me every orange bead you had?” “well actually no I didn’t!”

In my working thread closet there are 3 containers such as this. One is for size 11 beads, one is for Sundance Beads that I go to first when stitching shop models and this one you see here is for my size 15 beads. As you can see it is getting very full, so I have started another one for the 15’s. Remember too then there is the beading threads, beading needles, a tube of E6000 (which I haven’t used yet) Swarovski Crystals, pailettes, sequins and so much more.

Note to self: your bead containers are way too heavy now to handle them 1 handed! Use 2 hands next time.

AlleyCat woke up on the wrong side of the bed today as she was rather cranky and sassy for most of the morning. She was full of ‘tude, attitude that is. and until next time…keep on stitching

p.s. someone left a nice comment about beads and stitching on Bastet which fell into the spam folder…when it really wasn’t. I was going to answer it and publish it, but oh well! If you read this, please comment again!