Go-oo--od Morning, Bloglandia!

[quote]I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read and all the friends I want to see.

-John Burroughs

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I am an enthusiast of life. An irrepressible optimist. A storyteller. A collector and a connector. I hope that this blog will be a tasty side dish for my website and for some of you, the main entree. Here will be a place I can recount the thoughts I think as I work and play in Portland, present you with images from walks I have taken, retell in my own voice stories I have heard. I will definitely rhapsodize about the friends I see each day and tell you about the cool things they are doing in the world. It’s not ALL about me, after all.   I plan on musing pretty heavily about my passions for jewelry making, old and rare bead collecting, printmaking, creative healing and holistic living. I might sometimes mention my cats. I am sure to brag a bit about my family, especially the teen rockers who share my hallways and my artsy husband who makes mosaics with his own unbridled passion. I look forward to your comments and can only imagine my retorts. I’ll see you here, in Bloglandia!

I Love Old Beads!

Sometimes beads get a bad rap in the jewelry design biz. There are so many beads in this world, a vast swath of them crappy and cheap, that their value can seem diminished. I am not ever going to talk about the cheap, crappy beads here. I will only ever talk about the rare beads, the sexy beads, the old beads and the stunning beads. I will tell you about the time I paid too much for this one, or the odyssey I went on to see the place where that bead came from. Beads are a form of armchair travel, not just geographically but through time, stretching back thousands of years, to Neolithic times. If you have ever wondered why so many beads have a magical eye staring back at you, or would love to peek into a window on women in Mauritania making polychrome Kiffa glass beads using their own spit, I will take you there!