Traveling with Beads

I'm back in New Hampshire after traveling 6,000 miles from Arizona and looking at a goodly portion of the countryside to be seen in the U.S.A. I'll post a selection of trip photos after I get through sorting through all of those that we took. Right now I'm going to answer Bad Liz's question about travelin'.

My companion for the winter hand-built the small teardrop trailer for me. No, it isn't the traditional vintage camper style, but made to house beads. Guess you could call it my bead buggy! He bought a Harbor Freight rolling chassis, steam bent a wood top frame to get the right shape and covered it with fiberglass sheeting. If there had been more time it would have gotten painted to match the Honda with California flames. It sure relieved the congestion inside of the Honda and spread the weight out a bit. One quick try-it-out trip and it went on the road.... Only problem was a burnt out tail light bulb.

How do the beads travel back & forth?


All of my beads are packed into flip-top plastic containers. The worst part of each trip is to get the beads that are spread out all over my studio back into their proper containers and boxes.




The individual containers go into Plano #3700 fishing tackle boxes. Those boxes then reside in specially constructed cabinets in each studio. I can see the color groups through the translucent boxes and pull what I need quickly.


When I'm ready to hit the road I put the Plano boxes into L.L. Bean canvas bags. Last time I weighed the bags, I had 250 lbs. of beads. This trip there was 11 of those bags with an average of 7 Plano boxes in each one. That's what got packed into the teardrop trailer along with some tools and a large tote of clothing. That's about 80% of all the beading stuff I own, not counting books and reference materials.

Somewhere, about mile 3,500 we decided to change the route.... and didn't have detailed maps for where we wanted to go... so I bought the HP mobile printer I had been lusting after for some time. We found a back parking lot, hooked everything up, connected to the Internet to see if it worked ..... and laughed at ourselves! We both like rural, unencumbered life styles and yet .... here we were, behind a Radio Shack, in the middle of nowhere with cell phones, a GPS, laptop, printer and a 4 cup coffee maker.

Trip Tidbit - Bad Frog Beer

We were driving through Rose City Michigan when I saw this huge "Bad Frog Beer" sign and then a whole lot more in the window of an antique store - well, I made my co-driver stop and turn around......

I remembered a gift of Bad Frog beer bottle caps from the husband of a friend back when I was doing bottle cap bracelets. I knew it was a micro brewery and I just had to know the why of all those signs. Turns out that is where the beer started and the owner of the building was the original brew master, grew up and lives there. His original brewery was taken out by a tornado, then he contracted the beer out and that brewery got bought out and Anheuser wouldn't brew micro beers. The next one burnt down. Locals swear it's retribution for the frog with the indecent gesture. He also had a string of Bad Frog Taverns in Detroit, hence the Tavern signs. So if anyone got caps from me and they say "Rose City" around the edges, they are from the original brewery and are now highly collectible. All my caps are with my bracelet stuff in AZ so I can't go look. What fun I had in Rose City - if not for those gifted bottle caps for one of my many projects, I'd never have stopped in Rose City Michigan.

Believe me....

I really do have the 250# of beads in that little trailer for my personal use!

Coming back into the US from Canada we got stopped and searched by customs. They didn't understand why one person would have that many beads and not be a reseller. About an hour of unloading clothing and bead bags along with, "you don't sell them?" - "you don't do shows and sell beads?" - "Did you buy them in Canada for resale in the USA?" "Well, what do you do with that many beads?" I finally dug out a copy of my books and my train case of bead crochet samples and showed them just what I did do with all of those beads.... and they finally believed me.

Now I ask you, does a beader ever have too many beads and is a couple hundred pounds of beads unreasonable to have for personal use?

Anyhow, no photos to share right now, however we're in Butte MT for the night and plan on doing some sight seeing tomorrow. I guess I just have an affinity for Copper Mining Towns. Growing up as the daughter of an international copper mining engineer must have left the smell & taste of copper in my blood.

Northern USA

I'm in Idaho, about half way from AZ to NH. We've driven through AZ, NV, CA, OR, WA, and into ID... how's that for ABC's? Now it's time to start going East.....

We've traveled the winding cliffs of California's coast

Highway 1, driven down Lombard street in San Francisco,

through a huge redwood tree and down the

Columbia River gorge through a damp, mossy rain forest.

What beautiful, ever changing, scenery!