Rings 'N Things Beady Playtime

As mentioned in previous entries, I’ve recently become a Rings ‘N Things Blog Partner. I’m so excited about this opportunity to not only play with fun, new beady things, but to generate buzz for such a great company. I’ve been a loyal customer of R&T over the years and I think this program is going to be lots of fun.

Plus, I plan to give away some of the leftovers from the monthly goody bags and free beads are always a good thing, right?

Normally, R&T picks out the items they send to the Blog Partners to play with each month, but this month, we got to pick for ourselves and lemmee tell ya…I had a really hard time deciding what to get first! I spent several hours going over their paper catalog and marking pages with post-it notes to try to narrow down to what I really wanted. It was torture…but the good kind…the beady kind.

Finally got my order placed and not only did it arrive lickety-split, but how surprised was I to see that Russ Nobbs, the owner of R&T, PERSONALLY delivered my package! Here he is posing with some of the beads:

Russ decided to stick around and explore my studio and you’ll see more pictures of his adventures in upcoming blog entries, but let’s get back to the beads.

I’ve been working on some “beachy” designs on my sketch pad and in my cold-addled brain and I thought these beautiful ebony wood slices would be the perfect addition:

I also bought a bunch of these beautiful hollow beads (only picturing two, but I got a lot of different shapes, sizes and colors):

They remind me of Japanese glass fishing net floats that I used to collect in Hawaii when I lived there as a kid. They would break loose from the fishermen’s nets in Japan, float all the way across the Pacific and end up on the beach in Hawaii. We had a number of them displayed around our house in Kaneohe.

I’m not sure yet what I’m going to do with them, but I have a vague notion that they could look really fantastic strung on some of the new Softflex Extreme Trio colored wires (hey Dave and Russ – a hint for next month’s goody package, maybe??? If you're listening, I like "Serenity" and "Sophisticated")

The other items in the picture are some cool twirly earring components and some textured silver links.

I also bought a strand of plain white resin beads, but didn’t get around to photographing them. The plan is to try dying them with the Alcohol Inks just like I did with the Lucite flower beads. Then I’ll have a great set of matching accent beads for each of my dyed flowers and can get some finished designs made up with them.

Lastly, I have had these beads sitting around in my stash since April, 2006, and haven’t done anything with them:

They were for a custom order that never evolved into a finished product. In fact, it was the same custom order that produced the cane glass necklace I posted the other day that got published in “Bead Trends” after also being rejected by the customer. There’s a reason I don’t do custom orders any more LOL!

Anyway, R&T had the perfect “go with” beads so I ordered them:

And here’s what I made with them:


Originally, I was going to hang a bunch of additional dangles off this necklace, but once I got the basic design done, I decided it didn’t need anything else. Sometimes simpler is better.

A closeup of the center:

And the clasp:

I made it adjustable just in case.

I’m going to do the “bunches of dangles” idea on a bracelet instead. It’s still in the works, but in the meantime, I made this bracelet:

It was a bit hard to photograph in a circle so here's what it looks like laid out:

And another attempt at photographing it in a circle:

Okay, that's it for my first Rings 'N Things Blog Partner post. I can't wait to get time to play with the rest of my goodies and have some more designs to post!

KJ