embarrassed to tell this story....

I was part of a youth group called Camp Fire Girls. Part of the program was a series of good deed type tasks called 'honors' that earned the girls wooden beads. Each bead represents an honor, ten honors earns a large bead. Each color represents a category like arts/crafts (green), outdoors (brown), science (turquoise), citizenship (red/white/blue), business (yellow), sports (red), and home/hearth (orange)... plus purple beads for membership thresholds.

Younger girls sewed their beads to a navy blue vest. Older girls made stylized Indian maiden gowns covered with beads, patches and pins. These examples are from online. The wooden beads had large holes for stringing on leather laces. The organization went through crises occasionally as former manufacturers dropped the beads. Eventually they switched to beads made of plastic that were smaller in size. I believe the organization might have finally ended the bead program. A few years ago the wooden beads were selling in lively auctions. That market crashed.

As part of Camp Fire we made crafts using seed beads. We made wooden beads and rings at camp carved from manzanita wood. We strung beads into necklaces.

There was a bead store in town near the shopping mall. I would go in there as a teen and look around. The owner told me some of the earliest bead stories I remember hearing. She would often say "if you like these you should see the really GOOD ones like these, the old ones they don't make any more." I'm still puzzled by those comments, though occasionally I'll find a primo Moretti and think this is what she must mean.

Lastly, my grandmother had a number of multi strand bead necklaces, both artisan created and imports from Japan and Germany. She gave me her old and broken jewelry, including beads. I still have some of them, shades of dark olive green glass I never seem to get around to using.