There wasn’t actually much going on at Inspirational Beading back then. Only one post really stands out for me, because it included beads from my very first online order. Whenever I look back at those blue and green TOHO cubes, I get a nostalgic thrill. They represent the wide world of beading possibilities that had just opened up for me.
Although the other beads that I used in the tubular right angle weave necklace were simple Picasso finish seed beads, they actually sparked inspirations that I never would have come across on my own. Up until I decided to try shopping online, I had been buying tubes of Czech seed beads from a local craft shop, which were usually labeled as 11/o. So naturally for my first order, I added some 11/o seed beads to my cubes.
When the beads arrived, I was surprised by their size - they were more like the 8/o Czech beads I had been using. But, since I had never used Japanese seed beads before, I assumed that there was a slight size difference between styles. That’s why, when there was an Artbeads dollar sale on seed beads a short time later, I went completely crazy and purchased many different colors of 15/o seed beads. It turns out that the Picasso beads from my first order had been mislabeled, and now I had a lot of seed beads that were much, much smaller than I wanted.
I had never even seen beads that small before, and I was shocked and delighted by them. It took some time, but I finally worked up the courage to work with them. Later that year, I used 15/o seed beads to make my first beaded starfish - a design that would appear many times in my work and even tutorials for months to come. Amazingly, many starfish and rivoli bezels later, I’m still working on that first order of 15/o seed beads.
Do you have a favorite happy accident in beading?
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Hi,Mortira:-)
ReplyDeleteI usually buy all my beads at 'Fire Mountain Gems and Beads*.I've been used to get worked with#´the beads marked as the size of #11.They are very small.Once I wanted the copper metalic rocailles,but they didn't have ones,so I ordered the japanese 'Miyuki' rocailles in that color instead.Of course I was given a half kilo of...pop seeds:-))They are all equal and so beautiful,but I was surprised with the size.Now I'm going to buy more of them in many colors.Despite their tiny size,they are wonderful to stitch with.But...in another ocassion I went to the Swedish shop with beads and wanted to buy the rozailles #11 I always work with and I realised them...much more bigger:-)
This is sometimes surprising,but thanks to such events we can discover lots 'new kinds' of seed beads.
Greetings-Halinka-