Wednesday, April 17, 2024

Where to Get Beads, part 1

 Hi there! I have been working hard on finally updating my beadiecritters.com website. Things have changed a lot since 1998 when I first started my website. One of the major ways things have changed is access to beads in various colors. I thought I'd explore different places to get beads. Today's exploration in Walmart.

Walmart has a small section in one of their craft aisles with beads, plastic lacing, and keyrings. Here are some photos of what I found during a recent visits to two different Walmart stores near my home in Florida.

These first photos are of various small bags of beads. The only single colors were red, white, and clear. But there were several different assortments of colors, including pastels, neon colors, standard colors, translucent, and metallic.











They also had some bead organizers with a variety of color assortments. These are nice because they're already organized into separate colors, and the organizer is refillable. And they had a few colors in these that were not available in the bags shown above.





One neat thing I found was a kit with patterns for several basic beadie critters, with a container meant to help you lay your beads out before weaving the string through the beads. I really want to try this sometime and see how well it works.


They had alphabet beads in different color configurations. Most of these could not be used with regular pony beads unless you were using a thinner string.








Finally, they had some plastic lacing assortments, as well as some keyrings and lanyard hooks.





Stay tuned. I will be visiting Michaels, JoAnn's, and Hobby Lobby soon to see what they have!

If you are looking for the widest variety of colors, give Bolek's Craft Supplys a try! They have 78 different colors of pony beads!