F is for Floor
Beaders give a lot of thought and discussion to how to arrange their beads (by color or type?) and their tools (on a hanging rack or in a tool box?). But in my years working with beaders, I've never heard a discussion on one absolutely critical issue: floors.
Yes, floors. If you're the type of beader who has never dropped a single bead on your pristine beading mat, let alone your floor, you might as well skip this post. I doubt you'll know what I'm talking about. But for the rest of us mere mortals, here's a brief list look at some bad choices:
I used to bead in the kitchen, which had wooden floor. When a bead fell off the table, it would bounce on the floor . . . usually straight into the heating vent.
Then I started beading downstairs on the sofa. The sofa is comfortable and the room is carpeted. Thickly carpeted. Beads would fall off my lap table or the sofa arm and into the carpet. Bye-bye bead!
I moved my beading to the unfinished basement. The cement floor had a pretty high bounce rate like the kitchen. However, there were also cracks in the floor and many more places for a bead to hide. Plus, it was a lot dirtier for me to get down and look for a wayward bead.
Then I added an old sisal rug below my beading table. It stopped the bouncing, but the little square pattern in the carpet meant that when I spilled a partial tube of size 11 seed beads, every little blue bead bounced into a different square! The only way to pick them up by hand was one at a time, and even then I felt like I needed tweezers to do it. (I've heard about the pantyhose and vacuum cleaner trick, but that's a bit too close to housekeeping for my taste.)
A Solution?
Here's what I'm proposing. You know those little triangular trays you can buy for beads? I'd like someone to build a gigantic one, maybe 8 x 10 feet? Large enough so that I can put my entire beading table inside. Then, once a month, I can rent a crane to move my beading table and have the entire tray emptied. It would be nice if the beads could automatically be sorted and put away, too . . .
It'd probably be easier if I just learned not to drop beads on the floor. But let's be honest: that's never going to happen!