We turned on in the turn of the 60/70's decade, to discover beads and spending many weekends playing with them (on week-ends only, because our underground activities overlapped with the straight schedules: drop-out was postponed for some months). We would make ready a nice cup of tea and homemade special cookies and to the choruses of the Rolling Stones, The Fugs, Bee Gees, The Incredible String Band... seat for the Great Groovy Bead Game: a way of making necklaces as a team.
We had purchased many cheap, new beads, along with some older, nicer ones at the flea market; so the first thing was to decide, for restraint, which boxes, bowls, bags were to be used in this particular session -- we would choose just white and clear beads, for example, or black and blue beads, or golden and red ones, or whatever for the day's trip. These were put between the two players either on a table or on the floor, each of us holding one end of the nylon thread. The game could start now, all of it a matter of agreement and politesse, remember Make Love/Not War was the global motto, and specifically "The Yellow Submarine" we deemed Good Tidings to the World.
The first procedure was to offer or to be offered the opening move: the choice of the center bead: probably a large, odd one, more rarely a tiny one -- and with your choice you were already setting a "mood" for the session. Or you could skip the central bead, asking for the necklace to be "centrally open", that is a necklace that would eventually require a pendant to be chosen, or a tassel made...
Then each player by turns would select which bead (or beads and how many of them) he wanted strung then and there, and his partner would comply -- most of the time. Many rules were devised and sur-le-champ agreed to remove blocks on the road; rules perhaps to be forgotten in future sessions, perhaps not. Try to imagine how many situations can pop up along a yard-long path, when every step may be just one millimeter.
The resulting necklaces were not only beautiful artifacts, but also acted as catalysts for the coming into being of exhilarating adventures, group therapy, funny trips, even staged dramas. The average happening lasted a couple of hours and most of our creations were chevalières -- don't ask me why-- reaching to the navel and below.
I was donning one of them at Full Moon parties -- clear cut glass beads, jet beads and some blue ones -- on my first trip to India in 1971, till it broke loose while I was swimming in Anjuna beach, Goa, and was thus turned into an unforgettable offering to Ganga Ma.