treasure hunting

I just had an exciting bead store experience that I thought I'd share. I was dropping off my dad at work, since my car is in the shop, and I was just leaving the strip mall where his office was when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a display of beads! Having just finished a self-curated bead store tour of Fremont (very exciting new finds), I didn't think there would be much of interest. The bead store sign had arrows directing passersby to enter through the massive junk store, so that further lowered expectations. Nevertheless, bead stores are now like yarn stores, one of those things that I can't pass without checking out, unless under extreme time constraints.

The junk store had some interesting things, like a large selection of women's shoes, Korean blankets, Middle Eastern shawls, champagne grapes, avocados, halal jelly dessert mix... you get the idea. In the corner, there was a jewelry and bead area that was enclosed by display cases and didn't appear to be open. I asked at the main register area and the cashier told me that the guy wasn't in yet today and I was about to walk away when he showed up.

After a quick once over, I was not that excited by the array of Czech glass and fake pearls. I kneeled to check out the selection of findings and there was actually a cobweb connecting some of the findings and the lower display tray of beads. That was pretty gross, but then again, I was in a junk store. A large pack of earring wires caught my eye and appeared to be silver plated and reasonably priced. Then I saw a bag of filigree multiple strand clasps at a very reasonable price and started to get excited. The entire section was full of rhinestone, pearl and filigree single and multiple strand clasps. The shopkeeper confirmed that the beads were 50% off and the findings were 30% off. I got even more excited! Haha.

I usually am not that into rhinestones, but I thought these clasps were both difficult to find and nice, so I scooped a bunch of them up. Pictures and new designs to come!

crochet doodles

I've been working on some crochet designs using fine silver (.999) wire. It's interesting to see how differently the same pattern will work up with different gauges of wire and crochet thread. Even though the wire is much finer, its rigidity means that the same design with the same hook will end up a lot larger with more body and negative space (fancy word for "holes").

design tasks

In preparation for my store opening, I thought I would work on some administrative tasks. I finally filed for a seller's license and got down to designing some business cards. I think MOO cards are cute, probably because they are mini and have nice print quality, so I downloaded the templates and got to work choosing images to put on them. I wanted to choose images that would be reflective of my design aesthetic and would showcase my more unique products. Since many of my photos are blurry or grainy and my photoshop skills could use some help, this proved to be kind of challenging. The myriad of design options also became daunting, but fortunately, good friends were around to talk me down and review some of the designs. When it came time to upload, the website made me crazy by saying that my images were smaller than the specifications. I'm not sure how that could be the case since I used their exact template, but whatever. I ended up resizing the images so they were a few pixels above the specs, just so the annoying error message would go away.

Here is what I ended up with: