New Products

Have you seen the ads in the beading magazines for this new thread, Wildfire? I was curious, how it would be different from whats on the market right now. I am a die hard Nymo fan, and am not to fond of Fireline, so I wondered whether I would like this product. After much use, I decided I DO like it better then Fireline, but Nymo is still my favorite choice. Wildfire describes itself as "super strong, waterproof, and zero-stretch...will not fray at the ends...features the strength and durability of DandyLine with a smooth, thermally bonded coating". When you look at the Wildfire real close up (much closer then my camera could take a picture of), you can see that it is a nice supple thread, with a coating over it. This coating is kind of "rubbery", making it a little hard to cut through, and a pain to thread a needle with. As I said, I still prefer Nymo (old habits die hard?), but am glad I tried this out.

This was my first time for using the ZambaPro beading wire also. It comes in one of those neat clamshell packages, which are great for storage. I don't really have preference for beading wire, but I did like that this ZambaPro wire didn't feel like it was to heavily coated with nylon like SoftFlex. My sisters birthday was February 3rd, and one of her presents was this beaded belt. I think it was perfect for this application because it is strong, and flexible, which hopefully means she will get a lot of wear out of this belt. I also used it on my nieces Hello Kitty necklace I made in February, but I doubled it up, because I know how hard on jewelry young girls can be. I tried out these new "hybrid" beads at Artbeads.com made by Toho. The beads are made by the Japanese Toho Bead company, and then shipped to the Czech Republic where they were given traditional Czech glass finishes. I got a good assortment of colors, finishes and sizes, and decided to embroider an eyeglass case for my sunglasses(I rarely make things for myself). I thought this would be a great way to decide how well these finishes will last when they are constantly being rubbed against.

Since I was making this for myself, I dug around in my stash of turtle beads, and picked out a couple of turtles to use for my case. I also used a cab that I made many years ago when I took a lapidary class(the big green stone on the right). After much beading, this is the case before I put it together.
I really enjoyed beading with these beads. The finishes were unique, and beads were pretty uniform in size. There was not much need for culling. My favorite out of these ten colors would have to be the "copper penny" which was bright and shiny, just like a new penny from the bank. After I glued the embroidery to my old sunglass case, and finished the edges, this is what it looks like. Here's the front...

...and this is the back. I've had this put together, and have been using it for a week or so, and so far no signs that the finish is coming off (and this case gets moved around frequently in my purse). The metallics are still shiny, and the flecks are still discernible on the stone finishes. And if they don't yet have available that exact color , size, or shape that you need(hopefully they will be adding more options for these hybrid beads) you can still get all sorts of other seed beads from ArtBeads, stop by and check them out!