I have multi-drawer end-table sized plastic organizers with all my old beading/jewelry stuff in them. These have moved with us from the plague house in Louisiana to storage in Houston, to storage outside of Houston, to here. My daughter was five when these supplies were in pristine condition, and just like mama, she likes to play with sparkly things.
So I'm still doing inventory (it is taking forEVER) and I get to the fourth drawer in organizer #1... seed beads. And they are EVERYWHERE. Tops had popped open, and I think my daughter was doing some kind of zen-garden thing in there at some point. After Katrina, while our house lay un-airconditioned and unattended for months, insects and other fun, nature-type stuff had moved in. I found serious evidence of that in that drawer. It was not pleasant.
A lesser woman not in the middle of a recession/depression economy might have just pitched the lot of them and started over. I thought about it for about five seconds, when my grandmother's voice (she lived through the '30s you know) piped up in my head and said "You're going to throw all that out because it's dirty??!"
Sigh.
So I wrestled the drawer out of its moorings and dumped the whole lot into one of my crappier pieces of plasticware. It's amazing how many seed beads will actually float in water, but the process felt a lot like panning for gold, and as the dirt washed away, it looked like it too. Some nice AB fire-polished Czech barrels showed themselves like little glimmers of purple and green metal.
I may have to sit at my spinning wheel for a bit today, I feel so "pioneer-y".
New items up on the shop. Two new sets of stitch markers. I'm getting the yen to do some earrings today, if I can ever locate my amethyst briolettes.
Just edited to add.... After re-reading this post, I feel it's necessary to add the following: Please don't think that just because of this post all my stuff is in the same state! Everything is triple-cleaned and polished before it goes out.
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