newest bead and button goodies

I have acquired a number of new bead and button goodies the couple weeks and thought that you would enjoy seeing many of them.  I am frequently inspired by crafting supplies and hope that you will be, too.  Enjoy!

The downtown Vogue Fabrics store in Chicago has a random button bin.  You can fill one of these bags for $2.  The selection changes frequently, but I've never been disappointed with the given lot.  Check out all of the flower buttons, wooden buttons, and metal buttons!

I have two favorite bead stores in the Chicago suburbs.  My parents live one block away from one of them so it's where I usually go when I'm back that way.  I almost always stock up on seed beads, Czech leaf beads, and other Czech glass.  I go through 6/0 and 11/0 seed beads more than any other beads so I always like to get a few colors.  The Czech glass selection varies but I almost always find some great leaves and other unique shapes.  Check out all of the leaf colors and the great dice beads.

My mom ordered a set of these tiny glass bottles and corks for me for my birthday.  I enjoyed using the sea glass bottle charm for my tropical destination challenge piece and would like to use bottles again for future charms.  Why not make some of my own charms?

I picked up some screws for the corks so I'm all ready to go as soon as I get inspired.  There are so many possibilities out there.  Check out these great Etsy listings as well as this bottle tutorial.

What would you put in your bottle?

Finally, I cashed in all of my Bead Trends gift certificates for Fire Mountain Gems and got this box of goodies.  Yep, I had to get all of it organized by bead type.

Thank you Bead Trends!  The hard work that I put into my submissions was well worth it.

Have you picked up any new craft goodies lately?  What are you going to make with them?

Where I Linked Up Today:

bead organization finale

As you know, I've been organizing my beads, buttons, and findings the last few weeks.  You can read about the first couple steps of this project here and here.  This is the final installment.

This is most of my Czech glass as well as my small collection of Swarovski beads and buttons.  I know that this just looks like an ad for Art Beads.  A lot of my Czech glass is from Art Beads, but I've purchased some locally as well.  I have components that I have a lot of grouped together like leaves, daggers, and hearts.  I sorted the rest by color (except for the Swarovskis which all fit into one compartment).

I've been using these containers for a while.  I pretty much left what was already in them where it was, so there is some other Czech glass in here.  I grouped my shell beads and filled in the other spaces with random components like lamp worked beads and handmade ceramic beads and buttons.  I'm keeping the plastic letter beads but de-stashing the rest of my plastic beads.  I haven't worked with them in years.  I'm de-stashing on eBay.  If anyone's interested, let me know.

I know that some people would have a heart attack or, at the very least, would scream if they saw my seed bead organization.  But this is really all that I need at this point.  I've only been doing beadweaving and button jewelry work for three years.  My collection of beads isn't that big.  If I need delicas for a new flower garden cuff, I don't have to sort through 40 different greens to find the shades that I want.  I can simply sort through the 40 or so total shades that I have.  I have my Tohos and delicas on the left, my cube beads on the top, and my size 6/0 Czech seed beads on the right.

I have more size 11/0 Czech seed beads than anything else for seed beads.  Not all of them fit into the container so I left the ones that are in the little screw top plastic containers as is in that storage box.  As I use up other beads that I've stored in the screw tops, I'll continue to sort more 11/0's into them.

We just got a new bookcase over the weekend.  All of the boxes, along with a bunch of books, now have a new home.  I'll have at a picture up of that at some point in the near future.