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April 23, 2003
(from the People & Places section)By ED BARNA
Most people would say trading the island of Manhattan for beads was one of history's worst bargains. Bethany Barry, bead artist and teacher, isn't so sure.
"It all depends on the beads," she said, surrounded by them at her home and studio on Lake Dunmore in Leicester.
Beads have been as large as Christmas ornaments and decorated with gold leaf, and as small and plain as those made in tribal cultures from plant parts and bits of shell. They have adorned both the great and famous and the nearly impoverished, have served as trading goods and currency, have been part of religious rituals and practices, and have fascinated the clever and inventive for thousands of years.
"Why beads?" asks The Bead Site, maintained by Center for Bead Research founder Peter Francis Jr.
His answer: "Because they are the oldest and most universal art form. No people are without them. Beads are or have been made in every country of the world."
In the United States, beads are the basis for one of those interest-based "worlds" whose enthusiasts share a common language based on acquired lore, skills and wisdom. Passionate about beading to a point where they will travel across the country for workshops (like Barry's "Beading by the Lake" retreats and those she teaches in other states), beaders take part in exhibitions, go to trade shows, subscribe to magazines, set up shops, and support a small industry of suppliers.
The word "beading" can be misleading, because the craft relies on many other materials, and requires skills far beyond simply stringing them.
For instance, an experienced bead worker would know that the Bead & Button magazine headline "Create a freeform peyote bracelet" has to do with a type of stitching, not inspiration from magic mushrooms.
The final products often look more like thick garlands than strands, or stand alone as sculptural objects. The Lapidary Journal, dedicated to "jewelry arts," includes beaded work -- an indication of how genres can blur.
Buttons, a craft and collectible world in themselves, often appear in beadwork designs. And when beading is combined with fabric art, as is the case with some of Barry's creations, the results outdistance all the standard definitions.
To bead or not to bead
Barry first encountered beads back in the era when wearing beads went with flowers in the hair, slogan buttons, and extremely casual clothing such as truly worn jeans. Born in Pennsylvania, she had by her teenage years gravitated to Coconut Grove, the artistic-bohemian quarter of Miami, Fla.
"I was actually a hippie," she frankly admits, studying with a Hindu guru and seriously practicing yoga. What she gained from that period has stayed with her, most obviously in her yogic physique, and more subtly in the way she teaches that beadwork can be a kind of meditation.
The word "bead," she said, has had a religious connotation since the earliest days of the English language. Merriam-Webster agreed: It comes from the Middle English "bede" (prayer, prayer bead), related to the Old English "biddan" (to pray or entreat). Even today, the Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist traditions all use strings of beads for religious purposes, further Internet research found.
The ‘60s also were a time when many young people became involved with crafts, leading in the back-to-the-land era of the ‘70s to many "hippie craftsmen" migrating to Vermont. It took another 30 years for Barry to arrive, but she was definitely part of the crafts movement.
In the early ‘70s, she another woman had a store they called The Hobbit Hole, selling clothing made from India-printed bedspreads. Then one day "a younger woman came in the store wearing a beaded choker (necklace)," she said.
Barry liked it, asked about it, and learned that the woman had made it herself. Would she show how it was done? Sure.
"I started making more beaded chokers," Barry said. Among other markets, she found plenty of buyers at concerts by Janis Joplin, Jethro Tull, The Grand Funk Railroad, and more than she can remember "so long ago."
The store expanded. Barry expanded her knowledge of beads by spending a week in New York City, which in the mid-‘70s had a thriving bead zone along West 37th Street.
Moving to Santa Cruz, Calif., she found another business partner and opened another bead business. Then she found a life partner, married, and had her first child.
In 1980, the couple moved back to the area of Pennsylvania where she had lived. For a while they did all sorts of odd jobs -- house-sitting, pet-sitting, providing rides to airports, and more.
She even tried working as a corporate sales representative, which proved unsuitable. So she went back to making beadwork, for a shop in a town near Princeton, N.J.
Then came two turning points. One was finding her present spouse, and moving with him in 1991 to Haddonfield, N.J. The other was going in 1995 to "Embellishment," a leading bead and button show, in Austin, Texas.
"I took a bunch of classes," she said. "It was really good. When I came back from that, I started teaching."
When 17 people signed up for her first two classes, she knew she could do it for a living. But at the same time, she kept taking classes herself.
There are well-known master bead workers, whose expertise helps keep the field developing through the workshops they teach, Barry said. Jeannette Cook, NanC Meinhardt, Cynthia Rutledge, Diane Fitzgerald -- these may not be everyone's household names, but beaders acknowledge the assistance they and other innovators have provided.
In 1998, Barry organized a show of her own, the Bodacious Bead Show in Pennsauken, N.J., bringing 30 teachers together for four days. "It was the only thing like it on the East Coast at that period," she said.
By now, Barry has become known nationally and even internationally as a teacher. The first part of this year has already taken her to Nyack, N.Y., and Brookfield, Conn., Watertown, Mass., and the big
Bead Expo 2003 in Miami will soon follow; the Bead and Button Craft Show in Milwaukee and the Puget Sound Bead Festival in Tacoma, Wash., will come in the next few months; and her Web site
www.beadclass.com is already alerting people to Beadwork Beadventure Ireland, which she will be leading Aug. 8-19, 2004.
In between, much more frequently, are Beads by the Lake sessions at her lakeside home -- a boon to area bed-and-breakfast inns. Less heavily advertised, but known locally, are her bead potlucks.
Area craftspeople bring a dish and a project and the time to have a good gabfest. "We eat and then we bead," Barry said.
Just bead it
What brings growing numbers of people to beading? Partly, as the potlucks suggest, it's a chance to socialize. Barry likens the get-togethers to the old-time quilting bees.
Overwhelmingly, the beaders are female, she said. There are some excellent male practitioners of the art, but about 99 percent of the participants are women, she said.
Along with the talking, there is a chance to do productive work handiwork, the kind that ends with something tangible to show for the effort. In this high-tech society, she said, "there's such a need for it."
"Everybody would be better off if they did more work with their hands, and especially creative work," she said. "Typing on a computer does not count."
Then there is the appeal of the beads themselves, which usually are strikingly attractive, often are fascinating for the ingenuity that went into their making, and sometimes connect with other cultures. A bead show or bead magazine is a feast for the eyes.
Beads have been made from wood, clay, wrapped and glazed paper, amber, jet, shells, pearls, many types of glass, many types of metal, semiprecious stones, gems, plastic, resin, and more, Barry said. They are baked in furnaces, worked with tools, and decorated in all sorts of ways, leading to such beadworking terms as furnace beads, lampwork beads (done with a small torch), and miracle beads (the Japanese inventors aren't saying how they are made).
Even space research has contributed to bead-making. Some of the most colorful are "dichroic" (literally "two color") beads, made by evaporating metallic oxides with an electron beam in a vacuum furnace, where they plate onto hyper-clean glass as it rotates.
The resulting pieces reflect two colors so that the waves interact and form a third color. From some angles, these single-wavelength, deeply saturated colors appear to emanate from inside the object.
It's the same kind of ingenuity that led the women of Mauritania in Africa, who did not have a glassmaking tradition, to grind glass into powder then daub it onto glass cores and bake it over fires to create perhaps three beads a day. Treasured as antiques dating back sometimes a thousand years, wet-core "Kiffa" beads are back in production due to the resurgence of interest in beading.
As one of the beading world's many puns put it, "The bead goes on."
And the world will bead a path to your door
Beading classes typically teach techniques by applying them to the creation of a particular design, for which the teacher usually can provide kits. "I teach only my own designs," Barry said.
One recent design, "Earthly Delights," includes abalone, freshwater pearls, marble, blue goldstone, aventurine, Balinese silver, blue tourmaline, rhodonite, sodalite, rainbow moonstone, rose quartz, garnet, and seed beads (the most common beads, these glass beads take their name from "seed pearls," not plant seeds). The materials alone for that workshop will cost about $120.
But the participants at her two-day Summer Solstice Bead Retreat will come away with a family heirloom, and unforgettable memories of Lake Dunmore -- appropriately, a place that once had a lakeshore glass factory.
She's also looking forward to Beads by the Lake being part of this year's Vermont Crafts Council Open Studio Tour May 24-25.
"I don't know of any other state that has anything like it," she said.
And the Vermont State Crafts Center at Frog Hollow in Middlebury, which has some of her work, "is a wonderful place to teach."
Barry is delighted that they found their location three years ago, and now that they have moved up for good, she is making the lakeside retreat part of what some call "the bead chain."
"It's such a wonderful place to come," she said.