| Original Message: or..."Ya gotta pay to play" |
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We are only here on earth with our beads for a short time. We are their custodians only...after we are finished with them, they go back into the river, so to speak, to be with new people. In order to have certain beads with us, we sometimes have to purchase them at prices we wish we hadn't had to.......and that, in the pragmatic, material world, makes us the current owner. As owner, yes, you have the right to drill, sand, paint, smash or string them however you like. And you have the right to keep them as original as possible if you like, too. Related, a point I've been pondering for a time is the degradation and failure of stringing material causing lots of beads to wind up in loose piles. Beads turn up that were once parts of Mandarin Court Necklaces, Liberty necklaces, matched graduated strands of Venetians, etc...I admit I do cringe when one takes apart a necklace like those that is still structurally sound, because that's one fewer of those intact necklaces in the world, and without being part of the finished piece, the beads have thereby lost their provenance. But it's the right of the current owner to do whatever they wish, so I must accept that. I'm seeing a number of vintage Venetian mixes, newly restrung on eBay lately, which tells me it's about the right time for the linen or cotton on those nearly 100 years old strands to be falling apart...leaving lots of cool old beads for serious hunters like Stefany to find....and to restring into mixed strands, some looking like better combinations than others.... I used to spend a fair amount of time concerning myself with accurate descriptions...but now I feel a bit more like Birdi. As images have improved over the years, they can become more important than the text nowadays....and I now wonder whether I should write to sellers. Some are gracious and appreciate the help (that's a relief!) but others simply ignore you or argue....so I sometimes do nothing...in this case, the seller appears very very sure about origins of the beads offered in the attached image as ANTIQUE-19TH-CENTURY-VENETIAN-MURANO-FIORATE-LAMPWORK-MIXED-GLASS-BEAD-NECKLACE but a better title would be.... “Venetians with 6 possibly Czech glass beads and 3 new Chinese glass beads” The new stuff is sneaking into the piles of the old stuff, being put together. It's part of the whole "life's a river" thing - I try not to get upset about it. Thanks for the opportunity to ramble, Fred. All rights reserved by Bead Collector Network and its users |
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