It started last fall with a garage sale. Now, I tend to avoid those, have for many years. There has seldom been the budget, and even more rarely the willingness to walk around with my bad knees and feet. But the feet are better so long as I wear proper arch supports, and the knees have been replaced. So the pain is gone. Strength still leaves something to be desired at times, but that excuse for avoiding sales is gone too. So mostly I just avoided other folks' junk. I already have plenty.
That particular weekend there were two sales, advertised throughout the club. Two widows of members, also club members themselves, were strongly downsizing their huge stashes of jewelry making supplies. This meant tools, wire, findings, beads, stones, etc. So I went to both sales. Spent money at both. And once home, started poring over in much more detail what all I'd just brought home.
There were surprises. I'd done some selective buying, ruling out things I had no interest in nor need for. But in both cases I'd gotten more than I knew. The bigger item was a storage case, something like a tackle box though it would never be used at such. Once the lid flipped up, it revealed a deep storage area holding several spools of colored wires. Nearly all were in my favorite colors to use, red, blue and green. Much room was left so I spent a morning going through my wires and adjusting just what was in that space.
With the lid up the front wall came forward and down, revealing four pull-out divided boxes full - mostly - of beads. There were bunches I had/have absolutely no interest in. There were odd shapes that don't appeal, some which don't fit ways I know how to mount with wires that show enough of my own work that they qualify to be sold in the club store - strict rules there - and colors and patterns that I personally consider ugly. Some of those were selected out for donating to the club for others to choose from at our regular raffles, since I know others like stuff I don't, and have different markets for what they sell that accept things which don't fit in club rules.
Some were simply unsuitable, like seed beads so tiny that they slipped between compartments under the dividers and can't be seen for handling well by my aging eyes. Tossed! Some were broken. Tossed! Many were partly assembled in fittings or made of materials that again don't meet club (thus mine) standards, like plastic "pearls". Tossed! Once stuff went away, again like in the compartment for the wires up top, new stuff came in, just differently organized. Or in some cases, finally organized.
Then I spent a couple months working with them. Some things went out as presents, others got submitted to the club for sale, still others got assembled into small units for later assembly into complete pieces, and a few went to the club to aid in teaching workshops.
Finally, hiatus. Most everything just sat because, well, holidays, and getting ready for a new club job with all that entailed. And just plain because of running out of steam. But that doesn't last long, once I'm back in the groove. So I started looking for new projects and ways to use supplies on hand, partly as a way to keep me off Etsy and spending money on some exquisite glass flower beads for sale there. (Not entirely successful, that. I have a shipment from Russia in a few weeks.)
In the process of looking around, I remembered a particular kind of bead I'd dismissed earlier. They are rectangular, very flat, and very busy. No two match. When I'd first gone through, several had been broken. I was satisfied with cleaning out that compartment and ignoring them. The thing is I'm used to working with rounded beads, and my skills mostly work only on those. Sure, I could just string them, but that's not what we do in the club. "Just assembly" doesn't cut it there. But as my mind returned to them, an idea popped into my head for a combination stringing and wire wrapping of them. I started hunting for where I'd put them.
My idea was first to match as well as possible the beads by twos, to make into earrings. Several stood out on that score, so now three pairs of beads were separated from the rest. I figure the highly mismatched ones can be combined with the stringing/wrap into a bracelet where eclectic can be a bonus. And "matching" earrings might be a selling-point plus. In the process of sorting the beads, however, the details started standing out. Their flat surface showed lots of tiny flowers of all different sorts, colors, and shapes, swimming in a field of colored glass, crowded together so tightly it was difficult to imagine how the glass that held them together could actually invade the spaces to do its job.
Hmmm. Artistry at work here.
Not just that, but under the beads was a tag with a shop name and an interesting price. Those beads initially cost the person selling me the case of supplies more I paid for the whole case! And that's just the ones left unbroken. So I decided to start a Google search.
I had no name, just knew they were glass and had flowers in them. I went back into Etsy first and perused their beads, thinking I'd seen and rejected something like them earlier. I found some poor imitations, beads with very few flowers or other designs embedded in them. But now I had a name: millefiori. "Thousand flowers" in Italian, some were claimed to be Murano. Definitely some respect due there! Back to Google, I wandered through all kinds of examples, finding nothing quite as elaborate as what I had, but also gaining an appreciation for how they are made, with tiny glass rods of various designs and shapes surrounded in glass and then sliced into individual beads. How exactly they get a center hole going them, or a great polish, or when in the process, wasn't described. I've had a class on glass fusion, and nobody in our club has or teaches those kind of skills. We just cut, layer, pop in the kiln, and take whatever comes out. Period.
I think the prices of those earrings just went up! And I'm definitely only working on them with sterling.
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