I may very well be hollering delightedly into the void, but Hello, my dear blog, I have missed you!

When I posted last year that my spouse and I were in the process of buying our first home, I had a feeling it was going to throw a major wrench in my beading. Moving is such a process and it was complicated by painting, paperwork, and the fact that my future bead room ended up becoming our dumping ground storage room for the first several months of living in our new home.

Judge not. Moving is a heinous process and I shan’t apologize for my behavior during that trial.

And I truly did not bead for about six months. I have been pretty bad at keeping this blog updated over the past few years, but to not bead at all for that long was unusual and unpleasant. Once we finally got through the worst of the Furniture Buying and Stuff Organizing phase and everything was painted, I was finally able to bully my spouse into making a lifelong dream of mine come true.

Slat wall! I was able to source three reasonably affordable 4×4 panels of slat wall off of Ebay from someone local enough that he delivered them straight to my porch. Once my spouse figured out a safe way to hang something that heavy in plaster walls (did I mention our house is almost 100 years old?), he hung up all three panels for me and I am OBSESSED. I have hung up all my tubed seed beads and it reminds me so viscerally of when Beads Direct USA was a brick and mortar store and I could spend an entire shift rearranging seed beads on the wall into the perfect color order.

I am so delighted. ANYWAY, I am pretty sure that I promised y’all a craft room tour, so lets get to it! The white table is a motorized adjustable height table that I got for a steal at our local wayfair outlet because of some minor cosmetic damage. It raises and lowers with a pretty crazy range and so far I mostly use it at standing height, which is lovely after a day of sitting at the office shipping and packaging beads all day. It’s currently at sitting height so you can see all of the beads.

Here’s a slightly tighter zoom. These two panels hold all of my tubed seed beads. They are arranged in sections by brand and size and then by color within those sections. The gaps are intentional so that I can add beads as I buy them without having to completely rearrange the entire panel.

On the far wall is a third panel that I use to hang my assorted chain, ribbon, cording, and beading thread. There’s plenty of room for me to move beads over if I overflow the first two panels and I have a few extra hooks left, which also live over there. I keep my beloved cart that was gifted to me by my dear friend and former coworker, Maggie, which I keep filled with pieces waiting for photos and to be listed online (my least favorite part, so they have to be visible to nag me). I do keep a step-stool in the room because I am a shortie.

Next to the third panel of slat wall is my personal jewelry collection (which is mostly earrings). I stole this method from Spitfire July and its honestly so easy and convenient. The stud earrings get pushed straight into the cork and the ones that hang from hooks dangle from T-Pins. The large piece of furniture was kindly left by the previous owners and it is FULL of beads and craft supplies. You can see my white Elizabeth Ward storage system and all the yarn stuffed on top for my beginner crochet experiments. The drawers and cabinets are also stuffed full of beads and you can see my nail polish collection on the middle section.

Our old house is heated with radiators, but they have these radiator covers that don’t get too hot to the touch, so I store my display items on there. I usually need to leave the middle clean so that Bridget can hop up there and look out the window. It looks out into our backyard and sun streams in in the morning, so you can usually find Bridget melting in a sun puddle on the carpet. On the other side of the room is my beloved bird chair, which I also snatched from the Wayfair outlet. Sometimes you can find me sitting there to crochet, but my favorite is when my spouse sits there to read and keep me company while I work at my bead desk. Relatedly, the painting you can see by the window is “In Love” by Marcus Stone, which my spouse bought me for my birthday this year, which depicts a man in love watching his lady busily crafting.

I am in love with my space and have been so happy slowly organizing it and tweaking it to my needs. I have found myself in there so much more frequently. I will admit that I have been posting almost exclusively to Instagram. It’s so easy to be able to post stories and little videos over there that returning to a still image and text-based blog has seemed like too many steps to initiate. I am currently feeling optimistic about my return to this blog, but if you ever wonder where I can be found much more consistently and frequently, give my Wescott Jewelry Instagram a follow.

ANYWAY, I hope you all have enjoyed this little virtual craft room tour and any of you who still check out this little abandoned blog and dear to my heart. I hope to see more of you soon. I have a special project that I recently finished and even a new pattern slowly gaining shape on my bead table, so stay tuned!

All my love, Sam. <3