Laume's Studio

I wandered into an online buddy's website a few weeks back. Caty Porter. She makes beads. Wonderful, one of a kind, lampwork beads. It doesn't do justice to them to call them beads really, it seems to minimize what they really are, which are miniature little pieces of art. So anyhoo, I wandered in there a bit ago and fell in love on the spot with one of them. As the saying goes - IT CALLED MY NAME!

Have you ever seen the movie Men In Black? To be nice, I'll forewarn you that there are spoilers coming up. I hate spoilers. But this is such an old movie, that if you haven't seen it yet, well, then that's really your problem. But if you really think you might still see it and want to be surprised, just skip the rest of this paragraph. So, onward. If you've seen it, you know that there's a dog in the movie and on his collar hangs a "bead". It turns out that the bead is really an entire universe in and of itself.

That's kinda how I felt about this bead. I saw not a bead, but an ocean, complete with waves, beach, shells, cliffs, rocky shoals. I loved it. And a couple of days ago, it arrived safe and sound in my mailbox.

This morning I took it up to my friend Shirley's local bead shop. Blog readers, this is Shirley. Shirley, these are my blog readers and online friends. Say hi.

She comes to my aid pretty regularly. I bring my bead or charm or what-have-you down to her store, sometimes she's even open (it's a very small town, things are casual that way), and then I look innocent and helpless and she whips my little bauble into something amazingly useful and wearable, all the while making it look easy, and then pretends I owe her some ridiculous amount of money, like 16¢.

She helped me pick out some accessories to show off my ocean, and here's what we ended up with. I LOVE IT! To see more detail in the bead, you can click on the picture to make it bigger. Can't you just hear surf crashing and the sea lions barking?!