Bead it

I should say up front that I’ve never been a patient person.

Ever.

I’m one of those people who leave a message on someone’s answering machine and then call back until they actually get a live person on the phone. ("Oh, I just wasn’t sure if you got my message,” I say innocently.) I drive across town to avoid lines; I tap my foot and sigh a lot when I get caught in one. I interrupt.

So imagine my glee when I was assigned to spend an hour or so patiently stringing tiny beads onto wire and then write about it.

Here’s what I learned: The beads are indeed really small and hard to hold onto, there are a lot of them to choose from, and deciding which beads would look good with which is difficult, at best.

But I also learned, after spending an hour at String Bead in downtown Chico, that making a necklace (which is what I finally decided to do) is a lot easier than I thought it would be. Plus, it’ll be a great gift for my mom.

After taking the better part of a half-hour deciding which beads I wanted (I chose a pearl-like white glass bead and a jadeite green bead accented with small silver hoops), I sat down to work. I had pictured myself with little tins of beads, trying to keep track of the order in which to string them, but String Bead has a much better system than that. Nikol Simpson, the manager of the store, gave me a tray with a small, measured groove in which to lay out the beads in their correct order. When I was done with that, I simply had to string them onto the wire.

It was easier than I expected, but not totally simple. After an unfortunate mishap (I dropped the string when I was a third done with it, spilling the beads everywhere), I finished my necklace—the first crafty thing I’ve done since summer camp.

An hour had passed in the proverbial blink of an eye, and I hadn’t felt impatient once.