Lunchtime Bead Shopping

So when your bestest beading buddy who also happens to work at the same office that you do utters the words "you know there's a new bead store we can get to on our lunch hour, don't you?" you sort of HAVE TO go check it out. Two Fridays ago, that's exactly what Julie and I did (never mind that each of us has enough beads to open her own bead store...and she could open a second store just for scrapbooking stuff, too).

AD Beads is quite the nice little place. Very clean and well organized. Not much in the way of art beads, but lots of stones and Chinese crystal and pretty decent prices. I didn't pay more than about $6 for anything I bought.





I've been wanting to get some of these little rhinestone balls for quite a while, but the ones I kept seeing at my other local store looked kinda tarnished and junky. These were nice and sparkley and came in two different sizes (so I got one pack of each size, of course).





No idea what these are - they feel sort of like ceramic, but are too lightweight for that. I just got them because of the pretty colors.

Strands of carnelian - one carved into roses and the other with a swirly melon kinda shape. In real life these are much more orange/amber/brown colored, but they turned pretty reddish in the picture.

Spring green magnesite heishi - thought these would make some cool spacers.

Another stone that I didn't recognize, but since it looks like Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream, I'm in!

Bright yellow dyed jade "pumpkin" beads.

Same beads in blue.

Couldn't get a great picture of these, but they are blue tigereye hearts. Really outstanding quality with a lot of shine and blue flash. I've rarely seen this stone look so good.

Small oval crackled agate slices. They are black around the edges and then have a "window" of transparent crackled aqua in the centers. GREAT quality and nice uniformity on size and shape - no chips or other weirdness going on like I've seen in lots of other strands of this stuff at shows.

So, I bought a strand of larger, more freeform shapes in the same stone.

That's it for the purchases, but I actually made something, too. This set got started while I was on vacation, but then I needed to re-do one section and had to wait until my wire order arrived so I could do that.

Earrings are purple jade disks and amazonite pebbles with Bali silver spacers. They're a bit ho-hum on purpose because the necklace is, well, kinda wild.

Since Ryan and I just recently saw the movie "Rio" and the colors in it reminded me of this necklace, I'm calling this entire set "Carnivale":

This necklace started with a gorgeously crazy wild set of lampwork beads from JulsBeads. They all have silver dots on them so I knew I'd be working with silver as the metal of choice for this necklace.

I added in some mirrored lime green shell disks and amazonite pebbles.

Along with some juicy orange jade, teal seed beads and Bali silver bead caps.

Dyed purple jade disks and textured silver rings.

And lots and lots of wire-wrapping...

And finished it all off with a sterling silver lobster clasp and a last texture ring.

And it's off to Carnivale with all the bright festival colors!

Hope you enjoyed it!

KJ