Just a few minutes to spare before we head north to Chiang Mai...

We grilled several sellers who work closely with the bead makers or employ the bead makers. All insist that in Java, In Jember area, they collect from farmers or rob from graves kilos of old beads, usually in bad condition. Many are monochrome beads. Badly decayed, damaged, crushed beads are melted and reused for each color. I'll post some pictures of beads that are supposed to be all old glass except for some stark white.

All of them talk about finding or seeing large jars found with kilos of old beads which are used in the making of new copy beads.

I did not have time to contact the couple who went to Jember and are supposed to have pictures of the old glass in use.

In the Bali airport bookstore Dee and I ran into John Diepeveen of beadbrothers.nl He says he's involved with copy bead production and can recognize "his" beads because of obvious flaws like mixing patterns and designs that were never used together in the old beads. He also described jars of old broken glass beads.

It's a persistant story.

John also mentioned that the Slick sample card collection goes on display in Amsterdam next year. He invited us all to come see it.

--Russ (www.rings-things.com - Spokane, WA - USA) posting from Thailand