Choosing Colors for a Beading Project

I have had  the stone in my stash for several years now.  I  bought it at a store in Yellow Springs, Ohio called Unfinished Creations.  I have been wanting to make something with it, but creating a beaded bezel around a stone of this shape is not trivial and I really didn't want to get into metal work.  I also did not want to mount the stone on fabric and bead around it.  Kate McKinnon has been doing cool things with right angle weave and peyote stitch and it occurred to me that I may be able to adapt the Modified Right Angle Weave to create a beaded bezel around stones that are not circular or oval, the traditional shape for cabochons used for beading.  I started playing with some beads last night, but they were not the right colors and I also realized that I needed some precision cylinder beads to really get the structure to work right.  Fortunately I happened to have some in my stash.

Toho Beads usually has a reception at the Bead & Button show, and they used to give out some amazing gift bags.  When they introduced their Aiko beads (named for the wife of Mr. Toho), they gave us a nice sample box in our gift bag.  Recently I had gone through all of the samples that I had gotten and taken them out of their cool little plastic containers and put them all in zip-lock bags and labeled and sorted them.  This made it easy for me to go through them this morning and pull out a nice color palette.

Let me just say a few words about bead packaging.  I know that lots of places sell the beads in cool plastic containers, but I prefer small zip-lock bags.  Plastic containers can easily get crushed, their tops pop open, and they spill.  Plus, regardless of the amount of beads you have in them, they take up the same amount of space.  Plastic bags, on the other hand do not get crushed, their tops do not pop open, they will not flop over and spill your precious beads, and they only take up as much space as the beads inside them.  They are however, vulnerable to being stolen by acquisitive kitties.  Mine routinely will walk through my work area, pick up a bag of beads and walk off with it.  I always have extra zip-lock baggies on hand to replace the ones that have been punctured by sharp kitty teeth.  Besides, if I didn't store my beads in baggies, I would not be able to put them in these cool drawer organizers.

There is actually a plastic tray under all of those bags of beads with molded cubbies and my little bags of beads fit perfectly into them.  The cabinets and the plastic trays are from the Best Craft Organizer.

And yes, those cabinets are filled with beads.  You should have seen my cat Jasmine when I was sorting the beads to put them in the organizer.  I was sitting on the floor surrounded by piles of beads and she kept making passes through my piles stealing beads.

Bead Stash Organized!

Earlier this month I ordered a Best Craft Organizer Cabinet for my beads. It came this past Thursday (May 21) and I put it together that evening in about an hour. Assembly was straight forward and I did not need any help. The boxes that the cabinets came in are fairly heavy (almost 30 pounds) and are a little bulky. I actually unpacked them in the front hall and then carried the different parts down. I got the double cabinet, which stands a little less than 4 feet tall.

Starting Saturday morning I began organizing my bead stash. This consisted primarily of pawing through the plastic boxes and pulling out all beads of the same type. I started with the seed beads, organizing from largest to smallest, then the bugle beads and the pressed glass. Once I had the pile of bead bags I sorted them into color groups and then ordered them from lightest to darkest. This ordering was facilitated by the Beadcats numbering system. They have a numbering system that, once you learn it, tells you the type of bead, the color, the glass type (opaque, transparent, etc.) and the finish (iridescent, matte, luster, etc.). The really neat thing about their numbering system is that you can match bead colors and finishes across all of their different bead types. Great when you're doing projects with different kinds of beads. The sorting process was hindered a little by my cat Jasmine, who likes to steal bags of beads (and who can blame her).


I didn't quite manage to fit all of my beads into the cabinet. I still have 9 plastic boxes but that is much better than the 27 boxes that I started with. Seven of those boxes hold loose beads, which I wasn't planning on putting in the cabinet anyway. The other 2 boxes hold my tiny tear drops.

I am still cataloging my stash, another task made easier by the Beadcats stock numbering system, and my Fujitsu Stylistic (you can read my review of my stylistic here). The only challenge I have is that I bought some size 14 beads before they had instituted their system, so I'm going to have to make up my own numbers for those. Fortunately, the system makes that pretty straight forward.