Making Lemonade

Five Lemons by Jennifer Lommers

You know the old saying when you have lemons, make lemonade. That is the what I thought of when I read Lori Anderson's post on the ABS blog this morning.

Lori writes an excellent history on the soaring cost of sterling silver over the past few years. I always have had a great sense of timing, and I started making jewelry just when the price of silver started to go up. Back then I thought that only sterling silver was allowed to touch my glass beads, unfortunately this philosophy would be too costly for most of my customers today. So as Lori did, I started to explore the use of brass, copper, and nickel silver and in doing so it has opened up my design possibilities.

Lori also talks about using other materials for your beads, glass, of course can be very sparkly. But there are other options like polymer clay, ceramic, lucite, wood, etc. etc.

Check out the ABS blog for some great resources for these different materials.

Tomorrow is Wednesday beads, as promised it will be all about glass. I am off the the studio now to make spacers beads. I will be listing them later tomorrow, you can check in on the blog for more specific times.