Small Business Buyers And Sellers Of Beads Rally To Lake City
Call it Beadstock.
This town’s annual three-day festival attracts tie-dyed souls from across the country. They come from New Mexico, Colorado, even Vermont. And they all come to hawk and buy beads.
Yes, beads.
Not only your ordinary beads. Some are art. Really. And the more exotic examples can cost $200.
Sunday was the final day of the Bead Festival, and about 30 vendors wedged themselves into the Coeur d’Alene Cultural Center and turned it into a narrow-aisled market that smacked of the Near East rather than the Northwest.
About 3,500 people converged on the place over the weekend to inspect trinkets and swap ideas on how to make their own.
It was that type of curiosity that first grabbed Colorado’s Pati Walton four years ago, and has since turned her into sort of the Monet of the bead world.
Walton’s sister was in Italy, designing jewelry. That prompted her to buy a video on bead making, and now she charges hundreds for tiny land and seascapes set inside orbs the size of marbles.
She threads the globes onto bicycle spokes, and while the glass is hot she uses narrow, spaghetti-like whiskers of colored glass to paint 3-D images inside.
“It’s like decorating a rotating charcoal briquette,” said Vermont’s David Christensen, a beadmaker himself and a fan of Walton’s.
When she’s done, the works look like worlds captured inside a crystal ball - tropical fish float, plants sway and anemones yawn. All in electric shocks of translucent color.
Nearby, the table of some Seattle vendors was draped with long strands of turquoise and abalone shells and lined with delicate Asian figurines. Farther down the wriggling passageway were quilts sporting sharp geometric, African-inspired designs.
The festival is more than three times the size it was when it debuted four years ago, and organizer Lisa Hobson couldn’t be happier. At 38, she’s been into beads for almost 30 years. Now it seems everyone else has caught up.
“About four or five years ago, the bead boom really hit again,” she said. She runs a downtown shop in Coeur d’Alene called Zizzyzaza Beads.
Her 12-year-old son, Ben, ran his own booth - he sold clay figures that looked like tiny Jiminy Crickets holding spears. He wasn’t sure what they were, he said. The ideas just come to him.
“Some take a minute, others take 15 minutes,” he said. “It’s not that hard.”
The gawkers that constantly wound through the place were a little eclectic - the ones with sunglasses pushed up on their foreheads may have been tourists. Many, though, seemed pretty world beat.
A bearded, barefoot man outside played harmonica. A man with dreadlocks wore a tunic that looked like something from India; on his head was a Beat-poet cap cocked to one side. When spotted again in the park, he was hauling around a conga drum.
Some just perused the rows and rows of beads. A few, though, seemed full of purpose. Michel Waits of Laclede, Idaho, was one of the latter.
One arm held a box with square compartments, a palette of tiny beads separated neatly by hue. Her other hand sifted through clumps of flossy strands as Waits looked for that next perfect color.
She said she’s of Chippewa Indian ancestry, and was using the beads to make ceremonial clothing for herself and her children. But using those grain-sized beads took patience.
“It’s taken me two years to make my dress,” she sighed, “and I still have six months to go.”
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