I’ve been beading for roughly 25 years and I’m not ashamed to say that I’m a little crazy when it comes to organizing my beads. I love incorporating found objects, like interesting rocks, coins, shells, bottle caps, or even bits and pieces of old jewelry I find at yard sales into my work. As a result, there are quite a few individual odds and ends in my stash along with the seed beads, crystals, stones, and glass beads I purchase from bead stores. Here’s where I should put the OCD alert. I’ve never been professionally diagnosed, but my mom has and much to my chagrin, we have “being extremely organized,” as she calls it, in common. My beads, yarn, and books are really the only places I take organization to absurd levels though, everything else in my life has an appropriate measure of chaos.
One of the best organizers I have is a tackle box I found at a fishing store. It came with several of its own partitioned plastic boxes, it is tidy, and it’s portable (although, fully loaded up with beads it can get heavy). I use it to store tools, thread and findings, as well as beads. Otherwise, everything is in standard plastic partitioned boxes. For current projects, I use a gun case made by Doskocil. It’s pistol sized and has thick pieces of foam inserted into both sides of the case. I have a heavy, round porcelain beading dish cushioned between the two pieces of foam and underneath the foam I keep extra thread, needles, scissors, and anything else I might need. The foam helps keep the beads in place so the gun case makes an ideal carrying case for work in progress. I’ve taken mine just about everywhere, from road trips to baseball games and it works perfectly. I’ve never attempted air travel with my handy travel case, but my guess is it won’t be allowed on the plane.
I’m a fiend for texture so I never sort my stash by bead type, just by color, with shades moving from dark to light. I love pulling out a box of beads and seeing smooth, rough, sharp, shiny, and dull all together. One of the hardest things for a crazy person like me to deal with are new beads. Since my beads have to be organized by color and shade, blue beads can’t just be added into the blue bead box, they have to go in just the right spot in the blue box. Obviously, this presents a problem; beads aren’t that easy to move around when they’re stored in partitioned boxes. I’ve tried leaving empty spaces within each color box and then shuffling the beads until I get the new addition in the right place. I hate the empty spaces though, they break up the flow and make me itchy. The solution I came up with is an overflow box. I put all the new beads in this box and I only look at them again when a space opens up in one of the main boxes. I’ve tried beading out of the overflow box and I couldn’t. It made me nervous. Really. I have procedures in place for strays and miscellany, but I’ll keep some crazy to myself.</body
