I love beads. Shiny, wooden, expensive, cheap. Take me to a bead store—the overhead lights bouncing off rows and rows of colors and hues, blinding me with their brilliance—and I’m in heaven. Do not get me started on gem and mineral shows, because I will have a beadgasm right now. When I first started beading, my blingtastic friends warned how the beads would take up all of my disposable income. I laughed. But their warnings were true. Beads take up time, money, and lots of space—odd, considering how small they are. Here’s where those bead merchants gettcha. Say you want buy a blue bead. Do you want Czech glass, Swarovski, acrylic, or gemstone? For purposes of this little exercise, let’s say you want Swarovski. Once you pick your shade—you can’t go wrong with blue zircon—you need to decide on which coating you’ll want. R egular? AB? 2X AB? Ha! I tricked you. A bling whore would never choose. She’d get all three, o...
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