| Original Message: Introductions: Nice idea to do this every couple of years! |
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I've been a bead fan almost forever. My mom and I "discovered" a Native American (Pomo, N. California) lady at a county fair selling her lovely tiny woven baskets with beads in about 1968....and she also had little daisy chain bracelets for sale, which my mom bought for me...the Pomo lady also showed my mom how to do the daisy chains...we bought seed beads and with dental floss we were making daisy chains - I was 8. Besides the cool strand of old Czech beads my sis gave me for Christmas when I was 6 (wish I'd never taken it apart!), that would be my initiation to beads. Then I stumbled upon "African trade beads" at age 14 when I scored my first millefiori bead for 2.00, which was pretty pricey for 1974! I grew up in rural N. California. It was 1982 by the time I made it to San Francisco, where I really wanted to be since seeing the Haight Ashbury on the news in the 1960s! Better late than never! The first bead store I ever was in was The Bead Store on Castro. It would have been about 3 years since Jamey stopped working there. Around the corner, Gems and Jewels also had African trade strands of "copal" (actually phenolics) and some Venetian millefiori beads...Margo at The Bead Store let me use her pliers and cutters to quickly assemble a pair of earrings for myself, and that was the beginning.... In 1983 I discovered the Northern Ca. Bead Society and attended Jamey's talk on amber...I think I still have my notes somewhere! In 1983 I became the first employee of General Bead SF, now an institution. Actually I was the second employee but even the owners prefer not to remember the first one who could only deal with Steven for 2 weeks. Steven is......an unusual guy, but I collect those sorts of people and of course we became lifelong friends. I left GB in 1991.......had to join the straight job market...yet still sold my bead jewelry at the Haight St. Fair from about 1984 - 1995. Colin was born in 1997...Child care cost more than half of what my job paid at the time, so I stayed home with him while he was a baby....Poof! It was 1999 and David insisted it was time we bought a computer. I thought....Yech! They are so ugly and take up so much space! What the hell do we need a computer for anyway?! THEN.......I discovered eBay and that there were beads there and I didn't feel so isolated anymore as a stay at home mom! It was fall of 1999 that we connected with African dealers at the Ashby flea market in Berkeley. I had taken David there a number of times looking for African dealers who I had seen there through the 80s....finally we connected with M. Kabba and the Tourays! Then commenced what became 6 years of selling trade beads on eBay. It was during those early years, about 2000, that Esther G. sent me an email link to a discussion about one of my auctions on the old National Bead Society forum. On it, shortimer as asking if the eja (antique squashed Venetian wafer beads) were real. That's how we learned about that forum! David created beadcollector.net in 2002. We began to get steady use Sept. 2003 when the old NBS forum went down and it's owner seemed unwilling or uninterested in increasing server/file capacity to accomodate the increased interest/use and the many images... Anyway, here I am at Bob and Alyson's house on my birthday 2 years ago. Wearing my hot pink beadcollector.net hat, bcn posting page on Bob's computer...and Hendrik, look what I'm holding! Bob's site is on our links page, Art Yeti....he is a highly respected collector/dealer of genuine Tibetan/Himilayan artifacts (NOT modern repros from Nepal) whose killer ancient agates can be seen in Collectible Beads by Robert Liu. Who sometimes posts here as Harry Primate! I have sold at numerous N. Ca Bead Society shows and a few of the other shows in Oakland, CA over the years. I still put the occasional offering on our trades page here on BCN. For 2 years now I have helped Bassem (Ancient Beads and Artifacts) with his local and Los Angeles shows as well as the G and LW Rodeway Inn (now Quality Inn) shows in Tucson. High hopes to see everyone there again in 2009!
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