A Bead in Time

A Bead in Time by Lisa Crone (North Light Books $22.95 US/$27.99 CAN) includes 35 beading projects plus tips for designing jewelry using inspiration found all around us. As the author demonstrates how to construct each jewelry project, she also explains how she used inspiration from her own life to come up with the original design idea. Sprinkled throughout are tips to help you become more in-tune with your own life experiences and suggestions for using them to inspire your jewelry designs.

The tools and techniques section is pretty brief, including 5 pages with large full-color photographs. For the most part, this pretty much covers very basic methods such as using crimp tubes, making wrapped and unwrapped loops, and working with jump rings.

Other techniques are used in the book, but instead of including them only in the techniques section, they are covered in the actual projects. There is actually a pretty good mix too: bead stringing, bead weaving, and wire.

Each of the 35 projects includes step-by-step photographs as well as explanations about how Lisa was originally inspired to make each piece. A "Get Inspired!" section for each project gives you suggestions for how to find your own inspiration in a similar manner to those used by the author. For example, for her "Strawflower Cactus" bracelet that uses memory wire, topaz crystals, and green drop beads, Lisa suggests looking for inspiration at a local nursery, explaining that "some [flowers] seem to defy logic with their unusual behaviors or appearances" (60).

Lisa Crone collects ideas from her life experiences and transforms them into jewelry designs, and in this text, she shares how she does this while giving advice about how other jewelry designers can pull from their own lives for design inspiration as well. Along the way, she demonstrates an unusual combination of techniques and finished jewelry pieces, so there is some practical "how-to" going on throughout the book as well.

Beginners may be a little unsure about tackling some of the more involved projects in this book since the techniques section is not that large, but there are plenty of straightforward, simple to make pieces among the 35 projects in the book. I think this book really addresses the jewelry maker who is a little beyond the beginning stages and is looking for ways to start creating original designs of his or her own or who may be looking for ways to use beads in jewelry that doesn't equate only to bead stringing.

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