What a crazy year it’s been. Gwyn and I used our time in Quarantine well. We honed our process for creating great boxes for you and we restructured our pricing to make it simpler for everyone. We did one small shopping trip over the summer and that plus our original stock and some contactless purchases through Front Porch Forum has been providing beautiful and interesting beads for our subscription boxes. Business has been good though, and we were in need of a serious restock. Luckily we both have both of our shots, so off to a new (to us) vintage bead warehouse in Rhode Island we went. 

Our trip started off on an exciting note when about 20 minutes down the highway from home a full sized black bear ran right across the road directly in front of us, we came to a stop not 10 feet from this awesome beast. I had my phone in my hand and was in such shock that I utterly failed to capture even a picture. Trust me when I say it was amazing! 

On our way south we stopped and picked up some vintage stock from an out of business bead warehouse in southern Vermont. Our drive there led us through the woods and alongside the White river. The sun was shining and it felt like spring and more freedom than I personally have known for more than a year. It was a fruitful stop, but took a little more time than we figured, and since the warehouse in Rhode Island closed at 4:30, we headed straight for my sister’s place in Boston, where we stayed the night. The stars aligned perfectly and Gwyn and I got to have dinner with both of my sisters and none of our kids. 

In the morning we enjoyed my sister’s delicious sourdough bread and headed out for Rhode Island. I had never been to Rhode Island, while Gwyn lived there for several years in Elementary school. It smelled like the ocean and looked like a cute town from the 1800’s, grown up into a big city. The bead warehouse was in one end of an old brick factory building that had two great salt shaker shaped towers. We parked in front of some unused loading docks in what looked a little bit like an alley, climbed a steep set of concrete stairs and walked into a vintage beads mecca.

The overwhelming number and type of beads available is impossible to describe in words. We spent hours walking through the stacks of boxed and bagged beads and it was a joy to pull beads based on our next few months of themes. We made stacks near the counter and when we felt we had the next four months or so covered we started to check out. This warehouse is one of our new favorite places to shop! It is run by another father daughter team. We weren’t in any big hurry, but they called another woman out of the back and had all three scales going to weigh out our order. They had infinite patience with our estimation of quantities, showing us over and over again what the minimum order of each of our choices looked like, and patiently adding more. They explained how certain things are sold by the gross, rather than the pound and when we only had our EIN number in digital form, they were able to cope with an email copy. We had such a good time shopping and are so excited to bring you the next several boxes!