Back to the bead board!

Well, I'm back after cataract surgery and some other stuff I was dealing with.

I didn't expect my first craft work after surgery to be beading. I'd pretty much given up on that craft, simply because I couldn't find a market for my work and didn't really have the time to go beating the bushes locally to find venues...even if I could break in. Honestly, I figured that my return to craft work would end up being fiber art-related, just because I know there's local interest as well as in other areas, more so than there is for stone bead jewelry (the spouse is trying to sell some of my work on eBay and...crickets chirping, like there is with anything I do, it seems). Sad, but true. I went back to doing the stone bead work for a while in the late teens, but I've never been able to sell as well as I did online in the late '90s/pre-9/11 period. I was getting ready for my best online sales year in 2001 when...guess what knocked the bottom out of the market for online sales. Oh, I did some sales at science fiction convention art shows, but they never took off as well as the online sales did. At some point I decided it was far too much work, and ended up going back to school and getting a teaching certificate instead.

That said, I've always liked working with stringing stone beads, and was working my way up to experimenting with different types of bead design by 2001. I had a pretty good backstock of inventory, and was contemplating just how to disperse it because I just couldn't see doing much more with beads in the future. Between arthritis and vision issues, it was getting harder to do. Plus I didn't really have a dedicated place set up for craftwork, which slowed me down significantly, even with that big bead board I own.

I just kept looking at my bead storage and thinking that maybe I need to find a way to get rid of the backstock without losing too much money in the process. However, no matter how much I thought about it, I just couldn't come up with a good option.

Then came the second cataract surgery. The first cataract surgery didn't have as much overall impact on my vision as this one has. I find myself in the position of needing to take glasses off frequently because the current ones don't work at certain close and midrange distances (I got the basic lens on the recommendations of two ophthalmologists and my regular optometrist, all of whom emphasized that my natural focus is near-sighted--there were two years in between surgeries so going for a distance lens was NOT advised). When I went to the local optician to check out readers, none of them worked. The person working with me handed me a test card and...at normal reading distance, I could read it without glasses. I can almost but not quite do that with computers, depending on the screen and how tired my eye muscles are. She told me that I needed several more weeks before making any major changes and that...I might need computer glasses but not readers.

Okay.

Meanwhile, I'm taking both sets of glasses off frequently. It's not an issue with my reading/computer glasses because I use them in a particular area, but my distance glasses? I needed to drop them for mid range work in the kitchen and other places.

(I do not use bifocals or progressives. Neither work for me. Neither do contacts. No suggestions, PLEASE.)

So...this morning I started thinking about glasses chains. I had made some in the past...did I still have any? Alas, no, I did not. But--I had a necklace that wasn't up for sale on eBay and a convention tag holder meant to replace lanyards. I'm not going to in-person conventions, nor am I wearing necklaces these days, so...I have all the findings needed. I sat down this morning and put together two chains, one with a blue/white color scheme (the tag holder) and one with a green and red theme.

It felt good to be making jewelry again. Maybe I'll figure out a way to market it...or something, until I use up this backstock. Meanwhile, here they are.

I think they're kinda pretty.