April 2nd! Save the Date!

Mark your calendars, set your phone alarms, put a sticky on the bathroom mirror and tie a ribbon around your finger!

On April 2nd the Artful Bead in Carrollton is having a lampwork trunk show!   Meri of Fire and Sand Studio is bringing it to us!

Fabulous lampwork formed on an antique key

Like this!!!  and also like this!  They seem to be covered in sugar crystals!

Yummy sugar beads!and just for Easter – Voila!!

Bunny Easter Egg

Yes, he is absolutely adorable, and you can’t tell how cute his face is either.  Trust me, it’s waaaaayyyy cute!

Plus lovely things along these lines:

Selection of lampwork beads

That’s a hat on the right.  Like a witches hat – wonderful.  The face is cute too.  But she already has a hat.

And she brought a bunch by to visit us last week, and she has…  (omg-omg-omg!) SOCK MONKEYS!!!  Yes!  Freakin’ PRECIOUS sock monkey beads!  No, we don’t have pictures, we don’t want to cause a riot.  Yes, we have warned her that we want LOTS of sock monkeys for earrings, so we can all be in the Fire and Sand Sock Monkey Earring Club.

And NO, it isn’t April Fools!

See you Saturday the 2nd, 10:00AM.

PS – I have messed with it 5 times trying to get my words arranged the way I want them around the pictures, and it just ain’t happening today.  Sorry.  Just look at the pretty beads and think about sock monkey earrings.

New seed bead pricing in Carrollton!

We know how much fun seed beads are, and we want to sell more of them, so we can buy more. So we are offering a new discount plan:
Buy 10 tubes at one time, get 10% off.
Buy 20 tubes at one time, get 20% off.
Buy 30 tubes at one time, get 30% off.
Buy 40 tubes at one time, get 40% off.

And that’s where it stops, so don’t be greedy.

And yes, it is all sizes and shapes of tubed seed beads and the hanks of charlottes and vintage Czech beads too.

And we are working on reviving some of those wonderful Second Story beading kits too!

Yaay seed beads!!!

Carrollton Preview 2011 is History!

But we still have some lovely stuff left, just a teensy bit.  Well, more than a teensy bit, it’s a lot of awsomeness.  I think the huge green amethysts are gone, though.

And today, Friday February 18th, is  Tucson Preview 2011 at the Fort Worth store!  If you didn’t get enough of the stone trunk show (we really did have our own personal bead show in tha back room, didn’t we?  It took us over an hour to load it all back into the boxes and on the truck!) you can catch it one more day in Fort Worth.

Hm.  I am having a serious problem being coherent.  I think I just might be a teensy bit tired, maybe…  zzzzz… 

No!  Must have more coffee, so we can have fun all over again in Fort Worth!!! 

See you there!    The show is 3PM – 9PM, and there’s no possibility of running out of beads and closing early.  Really.  Couldn’t happen.   But get there early for the Best Selection!

Tucson Preview is This WEEK!!

Yes, our annual better-than-a-bead-show Tucson Preview nights have been extended this year into Tucson Preview days, with a stone beads trunk show thrown in!

The Carrollton store is starting this year’s festivities at 3:00 this Thursday afternoon, the 17th, and the party goes on till we are either out of beads or 9:00PM, whichever comes first. 

Then the next day, Friday the 18th, it happens in Fort Worth – 3:00 till 9:00.  (Or earlier, if we run out of beads.)  (OK, that’s really not likely, that we could actually run out of beads.  But possible, along the lines of infinite numbers of monkeys writing Hamlet is possible.)

With our usual tasty snacks, wine and cheese, it’s a party you Don’t want to Miss! 

Check out our Facebook pages (The Artful Bead in Carrollton and The Artful Bead in Fort Worth) for pictures and up-to-the-minute news!

(Sorry, no pictures here, I have to get to the store and keep pricing new stuff for Thursday!)

Our Annual Tucson Preview Party is next week!

We’re almost ready for Tucson Preview again this year, and we’re doing it even bigger than before!  All of the beautiful, amazing, unique beads, findings, and pendants we could find and bring back PLUS a fabulous Stone trunk show! 

Yes, we have a wonderful haul of only the most glorious stuff from Tucson, we’re really outdone ourselves this time.  We’ve got the fantastic lacquered torched copper, and fabulous chain like you will Not Believe, and some of the best buys in unique fancy stones we’ve ever managed.  (Sorry, that sentence got awfully tangled.  It happens, deal with it.  It’s probably the bead fumes.)  Add the terrific selection of pendants and clasps, and the usual wine, cheese, and snacky goodies, and it’s set to be the Party of the Decade! 

And it starts in Carrollton on Thursday, February the 17th, from 3 in the afternoon till 9 that night.  Then the trunk show moves to Fort Worth on Friday the 18th, same bat-time, same bat-channel.  (What?  You have no idea what that means???  Don’t you remember the ultimate Cheezy Batman with Adam West?  “Holy Retail, Batman!” says Robin?  None of it?  You have no clue???  Honestly.  I have to have a nice up of tea and a lie down, I’m so upset.)

Oh, right.  Anyway, the Fort Worth Tucson Preview and Stone Trunk Show is Friday, February 18th, from 3 till 9.  With the wine and cheese and chocolate pretzels.  And beads and chain and fantastic pendants and  (How can you Not Know about Batman on TV, with the ever-so-fantastic Julie Newmar as Catwoman?  Those of us watching the series in the 60’s wanted to be Julie Newmar with more fervor than we ever spent on anything else in our scrawny un-statuesque lives.  I used to practice draping my decidedly un-Catwomanly body over the couch, just in case the opportunity ever came up.) and more fantastic stones than you could ever shake a stick at.

(You know, Julie used to live in Fort Worth.  I sure hope she never hears that you don’t remember Batman on TV with Adam West in the 60’s.  No, I don’t care that you weren’t born yet.  That’s your problem, not mine.)

Sorry.  This whole thing got a bit off track.  I should’ve stopped at that tangled sentence.  Too late now!

Come see us next Thursday and Friday!!!

Groupon Beginning Earrings Class Information

If you bought the Groupon Coupon for the Beginning Earring class, please call the store where you plan to take the class (Fort Worth – 817-294-2903, Carrollton 972-242-8949) to sign up.  You can refer to the online class calendar for times and dates, but unfortunately many of the Sunday classes  in February and March are already full.

We will be extending the dates for the coupons, and will have more late (after 5) classes during the week in April, especially in Carrollton.  We will also be adding several Saturday classes.

If you have a group of 4 to 7 that want to take the class together, please give us a call and we will work out a private class for you. 

Thank you for buying our class, and we hope to see you soon!

We’re in Tucson!

Boy, are we glad we got out of town when we did! We leave and All Heck breaks loose?

What did you do?? We had a bit of rain on the road, and it is just a bit cold, but the sun is shining and it is rather pleasant here.

Oh. What did we buy on our first day this year? Chain chain chain!!! Lots of all new base metal plated chain, some of it nearly too cool to deal with, really. Pictures will be posted later tonight. And we got some FABULOUS raku for the Carrollton store.

And some unusual brass stampings.

And letter stamps in New Fonts!!! And some with shapes! Like spirals and hearts!
Insert Squee here.

Perfect cap to One Of Those Days!

It never fails.  You forget to send the email announcing the Czech Glass Trunk Shows when you’re supposed to, then you can’t get the new addresses to import into the emailer correctly, you can’t find the template you want to use, you forget the picture, and THEN, to set the whole thing off, you delete some teeny marker that tells the emailer to insert the first name from the database when it’s sending you the email.

So you send out all of those emails with “Dear (Contact First Name),” in the first line. 

I apologize profusely, we really do know your first names if you entered them when you signed up for the newsletter.  I truly am the Airhead in Charge of Communication this week.

And my animal cracker Bunny (bag purchased because I’m being thwarted at every turn) is broken in half. 

Insert long whine here…