Working Tuesday: Finding a Supplier

The secret to the best designs are the materials you use to make them. The secret to selling pieces is not only the design, but the price. The key to both these things is finding the right suppliers!

I love bead stores as much as the next beader. It's exciting to see the array of color and feel the weight of the stones in your hand. But once you understand what it means that a bead is 6mm instead of 4mm or the difference between aventurine and aquamarine, you don't have to hold a bead in your hand to know it's for you. And you certainly don't have to pay outrageous bead store prices.

One of the best places to go for diversity of supplies and price is Fire Mountain Gems and Beads. And the best part is, the more you get, the cheaper your final per item price. So if you need a cheaper choice than the bead store, try Fire Mountain!

Working Tuesday: April showers bring May flowers...

Ok. I admit it. I know. I've been obsessed with flowers lately. Alright, so it's not a recent obsession, but the difference is now I'm posting them all over my blog, my website... you get the idea. And I think it's been leaking into my work. Ok, it IS leaking into my work.

A couple weeks ago I got some Swarovski petal pearls in an order from Fire Mountain gems thinking I would use them in some wedding accessories and I think the results were wonderful! I think I'm either going to use them in a comb or in individual hair pins. Either would be lovely!

I'd like to do the same thing with petal-like Keshi pearls, but have wondered if I can actually make a profit on something like that considering the Keshi pearls I liked were somewhere around $250 a strand!

Those flowers went so well for me, I picked up some petal shaped dichroic glass beads in pink. I added some pink buttons for the center and started playing around with those as pendants. The latest I've paired with rose quartz and some golden spacer beads. I'm still playing around with laying out the design, but I'm having fun with that result too.

Last weekend, after spending a day photographing Mama E's garden, I decided to pull together some bluebell earrings from some Czech flower beads that have been hanging around. I've been collecting flower beads for a couple years now and I'm just getting around to pulling together some designs with them - and I'm just getting started with what I've got!

So you'll probably be seeing more flowers. But it's spring, so that's probably not such a bad thing!

Gem and Jewelry Show

This weekend is the International Gem and Jewelry Show! Can you tell I'm excited? A friend of mine introduced this show to me a couple years ago and I've been smitten ever since.

The show comes to the Dulles Expo Center several times a year and I try to make time to go when they're in town. You can find just about anything jewelry at the show. Are you a beader? There are hundreds of bead vendors, findings vendors and an incredible vendor that sells just about any tool you'll need. Like antique jewelry? You'll find an amazing collection of vendors with jewels that will make you hyperventilate. Like contemporary jewelry or looking for loose gems? You'll find that too.

I don't often see plique au jour jewelry, but I've seen it here. I'm able to get better buys on my gemstone beads when shopping here - and that's not even mentioning the fact that you can see and touch the beads before you buy them. My favorite vendor, however, is Efim Gilin (http://www.efimgilin.com/).

He and his wife are usually at the front of the hall and they carry the most magnificent jewelry! They'll let you hold jewelry that you might find in a museum and they'll talk with you about the craftsmanship if you show an interest. When it was time for my now husband to look for an engagement ring, we went to Efim - and boy did we find a beauty. They have pieces from a couple hundred dollars into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. And they have always been incredibly patient with my questions and requests to look at pieces I'll never be able to afford. They're just wonderful!

So if you're in DC this weekend, and you want to find a treasure, I'd suggest the International Gem and Jewelry Show at the Dulles Expo Center. If you're not in DC, you can find their touring schedule (they travel across the US all year long) here: http://intergem.com/

And if you DO go to the show, stop by and say hello to Efim. And tell him I sent you!