HANDCRAFTS Beading is blooming into a home-based business

New hobby is relaxing therapy for many and a profitable business for others.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
MIAMI -- Teresita Ramos has always had a touch for handcrafts and an eye for jewelry. So when a friend showed her how to fashion her own bracelets, earrings and necklaces from beads and thread, beading instantly became her weekend and evening hobby.
When her husband died six months ago, it became her solace
"It was really like therapy, my refuge," the bookkeeping assistant said. "It helped me get through a difficult time."
Now, with her and her daughter's jewelry boxes overflowing, the 56-year-old Ramos has turned beading into a money-making sideline. She exhibits her coral, quartz and turquoise creations at church bazaars and holds Tupperware-style jewelry parties at her Sweetwater home.
"It sells well," she said. "I never repeat the patterns, so each piece is personal. People like that."
A $1 billion-plus industry nationally, beading is blooming. New bead stores are spurring more people to take it up as a hobby, one that often turns into a home-based business.
After a lull following the 1960s, when hippies made beads their signature accessory, beading has been making a nationwide comeback since the early '90s. A big reason is that it's easy, said Alice Korach, founding editor of the Wisconsin-based Bead & amp;Button magazine, which has grown in circulation from 5,000 when it started in 1993 to about 180,000 today.
"With sewing, you have to be really good, so it doesn't look like you made it," Korach said. "But beading is extremely easy."
Inexpensive tools
And affordable. Estimated start-up cost: about $30 for a wire cutter, two types of pliers for the catches and a board to hold the item while it's being worked on.
The beads themselves range from about 4 cents, for a tiny wooden sphere, to $49, for a semiprecious stone or acrylic glass pendant.
"I've seen necklaces that sell for hundreds of dollars at Bloomingdale's that you can make for maybe $40," said Eva Areias, an avid beader and co-owner of The Bead Boutique in Miami.
According to the Hobby Industry Association, the number of bead stores has doubled to about 1,000 over the past decade and they now serve more than 2 million beading households.
And the International Bead Expo, which holds its four-day sale and workshop extravaganza in Miami every two years, attracted 7,000 participants last May, up from 5,000 at the last Miami venue, in 2001.
"It's one of the few crafts that is cross-generational," said Don Meyer, marketing director for the New Jersey-based association. "And there are so many applications. Now we're seeing people using beads in scrapbooking, particularly wedding scrapbooks. Tweens are using beads on their school books, clothes, bags."
The Bead Need in Miami opened 12 years ago, but "it took me till last year to make a profit," co-owner Dee Perry said.
Bead Need is now the largest store of its kind in South Florida, he said, and set to get bigger -- moving in February within the same mall but to a space double in size.
Stringing out from hub
"We need more room for classes," said Perry, adding that his customers come from all over for advanced instructions.
Bead shops serve as the hobby's hub, offering tutoring in techniques ranging from basic stringing to intricate weaving as well as selling thousands of multihued beads from all over the world and such other supplies as catches, pliers and threads.
At Bijoux Design Creations, in Miami's Bird Road Art District, the walls are alive with a gorgeous rainbow of strands of such semiprecious stones as amethyst, carnelian, citrine, garnet and rose quartz.
The tables, meanwhile, are jammed with pots of smaller beads made from all kinds of substances -- coral, glass, metals. plastic, seeds, wood, even sparkling Swarovski crystal -- with origins as exotic as they look, including Africa, Bali, the Czech Republic, India.
The dazzling array is often enough to enthuse passersby not only to enter but also to sign up for $30 beading classes, said Nancy Albert, who opened the shop with her husband, Dave, in September 2002 after returning to South Florida from California and finding it hard to get beads.
"People are starting to get more into it here," she said. "And once you start it, it becomes addictive."
Form of relaxation
The hobby quickly becomes a type of mental relaxation, fans say.
"It's a way to destress, something to take your mind off the trials and tribulations of life," said Nancy Albert, a former corporate-events planner. "Men bead, too."
Terri Skinner, a Palmetto Bay, Fla., homemaker, started about three years ago, to occupy those times when her pilot husband was away. Now she finds little time for anything else.
Besides actually beading, she teaches beading, works in a bead shop and sells her beaded products.
"I like the diversity of the beads, mixing them for different effects, combining different textures and colors," she said. "Then you get this phenomenal, unique piece of jewelry."