WHAT WAS I THINKING?!

It was 2000. The location was Oregon. I had been playing around with making cards, using stamps and inks and found objects. I thought it might be fun to add some beads ~ I'd always loved beads ever since my "hippie" (I'm using the term very loosely) days in the '60s when we had a macrame pot hanger in every corner of the house and beyond. From the pot hangers I went onto what is today called: "Macro-Macrame" ~ special, finely-detailed macrame necklaces and bracelets. At the time, they were pretty on-the-cusp.

As anyone knows, the best way to hang necklaces is from expandable wooden coffee cup holders. They can be purchased inexpensively at any hardware store or craft emporium. Many of us have been doing it for decades, I mean really decades! While rummaging through my hanging necklaces a few days ago, some 50 years old, I came across the above pieces. Now... once you've stopped laughing, you'll realize that I'm sharing with you my deep, dark secret and I only do that with good friends. These 2 pieces are the first "beaded" necklaces I ever made. I thought they were creative and different. My husband was the first to agree: "they were different alright."

That winter of 2000 we went on a trip to Arizona, spending several of the worst winter months in the sunshine of the south. I was looking forward to making some more of those "different" card-neckpieces. While wandering around Old Town in Yuma one day, I spied a shop called the "Navajo Center." Sounded interesting to me and wandering inside, I began my real journey into beading. They had wonderful choices of genuine stones: turquoise, lapis, stone slices and more. The the entire middle of the store was filled with bins and bins of every kind of bead imagineable, in every color and texture. I must have played with those little things for hours and by the time I left the shop, I had signed up for my first "real" beading lesson. Today that teacher is one of my dearest friends but that's another chapter...

That was almost the beginning of my beading adventure because truthfully, it started with the photo above. That insatiable curiosity, that immeasurable feeling of gratification, that hunger for the next combination of colors and textures of those little round and square items with holes in them was born with that first lesson in the desert in the winter of 2000. That winter I was stricken quite ill and became what I am today: a beadaholic. Welcome to my world!