Yesterday's Squirrel Has a Beaded Cousin

It's going to rain off and on all day today, according to the hubster/weather authority.  That's nice in a way, because it lessens the threat of guilt for doing what I really wanted to do today, which is going into the sewing room.

But then package delivery happened, and here I am at the computer talking about the day's haul. But not of sewing items, those are still on the way.  I did get beads.  I ordered some seed beads from a couple of places because I'm knitting some beaded bracelets, and they're like potato chips -- you can't do just one.  

In September when I signed up for Vogue Knitting Live and a class with Laura Nelkin on beaded knitting I just pulled some random beads out of my little stash along with some random sock yarn scraps.  Nothing really matched or had any relationship to each other.  The resulting swatch turned out to look halfway decent though -- anything blinged up looks nice I guess!

I stopped when I ran out of beads.  I guess it's sort of a pattern... I get a little 'regular' on the randomness sometimes.  That must come from living for 49 years with Mr. OCD.

So next step was ordering a bracelet kit from Laura Nelkin's website, since that's how you get the patterns, and the one I got came with leather ends with snaps inserted so it was a win-win.  I was also digging in the knitting stash and found a couple of additional LN kits that I'd purchased back in the dark ages from a local yarn shop, but was not in love with the color combos.  I don't know what I was matching when I bought those but my taste has changed. So off I went to the world wide web and bead shops on line.

I've purchased beads on line before, so I knew a couple of sources, Auntie's Beads, Shipwreck Beads, Fire Mountain Gems... Laura had warned us about shopping on line at some places, where they keep telling you "only 275 more items to get to the next discount level".  LOL!  Not really 275, but it keeps you shopping to see what happens!

The problem was that the quantities made price comparisons difficult.  Just how many #6 beads make up 25 grams?  8.9 grams?  40 grams?  Does it make them less expensive when you buy the larger package even without a discount? 

Some patterns say you need 250 beads, some say 250 grams.  If the description doesn't give a count of beads per gram, what to do, what to do?  Like the teeshirt says, you said there'd be no math!!😖

So I ordered several packages of different sizes from three sources in order to do the eyeball test, and then did the math on price per gram.  If your eyes glaze over at the mention of unit pricing, skip down to the pictures.  Laura recommended Japanese beads, so I stuck with those brands.

Auntie's Beads: I bought four different packs.  I didn't buy the same beads in each place so this is not an apples to apples comparison.  These were 25 gram packets, which was a lot of beads, and the price ended up being 11 to 13 cents per gram before shipping.  Beads alone were $12.39.  No discount was received and shipping was $3.95.  So after shipping charges were applied that made the average price 16.3 cents per gram for Miyuki seed beads, two kinds of size 6 beads and two of size 8.

Lima Beads, somewhere I'd never tried, had TOHO beads, sizes 6 and 8, and a few colors in size 3.  Size 3 is larger than size 6, and 6 is larger than 8.  I got a little wild on this order because the packages were small, so I got more colors.  (Made sense to me at the time.)  Beads added up to $22.70 for 17 vials of 8.9 grams each. That was 14.59 cents per gram, but I got a 15% discount off my first order and that brought it down to 12.75 cents.  Shipping was free on this order, I must have reached a threshold.  They also sent me a stick of red licorice.

I still have a package coming from Fire Mountain.  You have to order 14 items before any discount kicks in, and I stopped short of that.  The unit prices on what I did order went from 14.5 cents per gram for some #6 beads to 7.9 cents for some tiny #11s.  Total for beads was 31.22 or 13 cents per gram and that increased to 16.35 cents per gram after tax and shipping.  They were the only ones who charged sales tax.

The Lima Beads haul.

The Auntie's package.

So what have I learned?  Nothing too profound.  

• I like getting things in the mail.  
• You don't need to be a math genius to spend a lot of money on craft supplies.
• Beads come in dozens of different packet sizes.  
• Not every website carries every size.  I only found big #3 beads in one place.
• Discounts are enticing but can lead you to overspend.
• There are a LOT of beads in even an 8.9 gram tube!
• I'm not counting individual beads.  It's like guessing how many jelly beans are in a mason jar.

Craft on...