“Rich Varietals”

My Apothecary Chest: in 1994, it arrived via container to California from Hong Kong, where I discovered beading during an ex-pat assignment there. Serves as the repository for my beads.  Handcrafted.  It has 52 Drawers.

2017 Challenge: Create a Necklace a Week, using only the Beads from one Drawer at a time. Voila!  52 Necklaces!

Week 7/Drawer 7: February 22, 2017: “Rich Varietals” 

Drawers 8 & 9 are labeled Brown, but I did not find a lot of traditional brown color; rather there is honey, root beer, caramel, brick and mahogany.

This necklace has a second name: Susie’s Beads.  Susie Whitinghill is my beloved husband’s beloved daughter-in-law…lots of loving going around in the Beadle Family!  She gave me a necklace for a special occasion and I loved wearing it…until it broke and, like the bead vulture I am, I put the beads in Drawer 8 instead of re-stringing it.  I present it now, reincarnated.

The 16 large Indian glass beads of root beer and olive are from Susie’s necklace. I added honey beads—Czech glass in faceted cylinders and squares—which I repeated in the earrings.

I found a perfect large lampwork glass bead in my stash for the centerpiece! It is a cylinder bead with a brown branch wrapping around it plus abstract color dots of red, orange and yellow plus a brilliant honey-on-steroids sun image.  Then, to make it more complex, the artist-maker puffed up the cylinder with a clear layer of glass and laid raised multi-colored flower forms above the brown branch!  I feel so bad the original tag was lost and I can’t credit the maker.

By now you know I treasure my beads stories as well as form my own opinions of them. I have a special characterization of the three kinds of glass beads I use frequently:  Venetian glass (see Drawers 1 & 2) is the most sophisticated, hand worked and well-designed; Czech glass is my standby filler, well made and affordable, appearing in 80% of  necklaces presented so far; and Indian glass, the newcomer to the bead industry with decades of history as compared to centuries for the other two, is cheery and colorful.  Lampwork glass stands alone since each is artist-made.

This necklace is 21” around with a dangle of 3”. Earrings included.  $59.