It seems like beads have been coursing through my veins forever...but in reality I started collecting in the late 70's....I started as a silversmith and gem cutter at the end of high school, mostly cabbing turquoise and coral, eventually moving on to Opal.....when, on one of my rough stone buying trips to Tucson, I found a remarkable cylinder seal bead from Sassanian origins....when I pondered that another human had formed this incredible little piece of history many hundreds/thousands of years ago, I was hooked.......at that time there were not many bead books and certainly no internet, I was alone on my island of bead collecting, most of my friends had no clue and thought I was strange! The good thing about bead collecting in the early days was that you could put the collection aside for weeks or months and get back to it when the timing was right, they didn't take up any room and they traveled well....my first Kiffa bead came from a lady's bead store, set up in her kitchen, in a residential neighborhood in Phoenix, the name was Margaret's Bead Bar (long since gone)....a friend, who knew I liked beads, was looking for a birthday present for me and stumbled upon the "store", at the same time that she was shopping for me, an African trader was selling some goods to Margaret and he showed her a small handful of Kiffa beads, my friend overheard the conversation and was allowed to purchase a perfect polychrome triangle Kiffa (soon to end up in my grubby paws)....that single bead started my quest for real bead knowledge...it wasn't until the late 80's when the current wave of bead books started hitting the market, that I even realized the types of beads I had been collecting were rare and collectible......I remember buying the first beads that Abdul Touray and Ebrihma Silah brought to Quartzite their first trip to the states....once I found there were real dealers and other collectors, I never looked back....now I buy and sell